- A needless struggle at a time of crisis
Along with disputes over the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which are serious enough and which involve just everyone’s health but also their livelihoods, the federal and Sindh governments have chosen this time of crisis to struggle over the control of three of Karachi’s leading hospitals; The National Institute of Cardiovascular Health, The Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Institute and The National Institute of Child Health. There has been an opening exchange of letters between the federal and provincial health ministries, and it is to be expected that this will continue.
The rights and the wrongs of the matter after the Eighteenth Amendment, and of the Eighteenth Amendment itself, cannot be made the primary issue; of prime relevance is patient welfare. The experiences of similar hospitals in Punjab and KP, where the PTI holds provincial office as well, do not give cause for greater optimism. It does seem that the PTI is not letting go its party prejudices in Sindh where it is in the opposition and where the provincial government has been formed by the PPP. It has been the case that the pandemic has been handled by the Sindh government with more purposefulness. This seems to have been resented by the federal government sufficiently to make it attempt to take over the hospitals which it sees as having contributed to this success.
Even if the federal government does have a claim to the running of these hospitals, the timing of this controversy move does seem an unfortunate distraction. Covid-19 has highlighted a situation where the provincial government of the main point of entry of this pandemic is in the jurisdiction of one party, but the central government is in another’s. It is the responsibility of the centre to coordinate the effort to fight the pandemic, a task at which it can report few successes so far. Instead, it has chosen to set in motion what seems a needless bureaucratic bun fight. The issue of the control of the three institutions concerned would really be of interest to a part of the medical community, and must at the moment be subordinated to that of patients.
