LAHORE: The Specialized Healthcare and Medical Education Department of Punjab has approved the constitution of a Technical Working Group to review and draft standard operating procedures for nursery and neonatology setups across every public-sector, teaching and tertiary care hospital in the province.
According to the notification issued by the department, Professor Dr Masood Sadiq, Vice Chancellor of the University of Child Health Sciences, will serve as convener of the group. Professor Khawaja Ahmad Irfan Waheed, retired Professor of Neonatology at the Children’s Hospital Lahore, will act as co-convener.
The Technical Working Group brings together clinical, administrative, engineering and emergency-response expertise.
Its members are Director General Nursing Ms Tahira Parveen; Principal of Gujranwala Medical College Professor Haroon Hamid; Executive Director of the Children’s Hospital Multan Professor Dr Kashif Chishti; Professor of Paediatric Medicine at Khawaja Muhammad Safdar Medical College Sialkot, Professor Mudassar Hussain; neonatologist and General Secretary of the Pakistan Paediatric Association Punjab, Dr Kaleem Akhtar Malhi; Associate Professor of Neonatology at Quaid-e-Azam Medical College Bahawalpur, Dr Muhammad Anwar; Assistant Professor of Neonatology at the Children’s Hospital Lahore, Dr Mazhar Qadeer Khan; biomedical engineer Irfan Haider; and a representative of the Emergency Services Department, Rescue 1122.
The department has assigned the group four distinct workstreams.
First, it will establish clear clinical criteria for the admission and discharge of neonatal patients, with the stated aim of optimising the use of resources and balancing patient load across facilities.
Second, it will design formal step-down and shared-care arrangements with adjoining and peripheral hospitals, so that stabilised newborns can be transferred at an appropriate stage and scarce tertiary capacity is freed for the sickest infants.
Third — and most directly connected to recent events — the group will propose infrastructure guidelines addressing fire hazards in neonatal units, electrical load-related problems, and emergency evacuation challenges. It will draft comprehensive SOPs covering fire protection, emergency evacuation, firefighting and electrical load management, framed specifically around the neonatal care environment.
Fourth, the group will develop training modules for doctors, nurses and support staff covering emergency evacuation drills, the safe transfer of newborns, and basic firefighting.
The department has directed the Technical Working Group to submit its recommendations to the competent authority within seven days.
The technical content of this mandate deserves explanation, because it is not obvious why a nursery should require a bespoke fire regime.
Neonatal intensive care units concentrate three risk factors that rarely coincide elsewhere in a hospital. They run enriched oxygen environments, and oxygen dramatically accelerates combustion — a spark that would smoulder in an ordinary ward can flash across an oxygen-rich space. They carry unusually high electrical loads per square metre: incubators, ventilators, phototherapy units, warmers and monitors all draw continuously, often on ageing distribution boards never designed for that density. And their patients cannot be walked out. Every occupant must be individually carried, many while still attached to respiratory support.
That combination is why international neonatal safety standards treat evacuation as a staffing problem as much as an engineering one, specifying minimum staff-to-cot ratios for night shifts precisely because a skeleton crew physically cannot move a full nursery.
A seven-day deadline is aggressive, and that cuts both ways. It signals urgency; it also risks producing a document rather than a programme. The test of this exercise will come after the SOPs are notified — in whether Punjab funds the electrical upgrades, compartmentation and detection systems the group is likely to recommend, and whether the Health Department builds an inspection regime with the authority to close a non-compliant unit.
Punjab has an advantage here that the federal capital does not: an institutional base at the University of Child Health Sciences and a large tertiary paediatric network. Used properly, this group could produce the country’s first enforceable neonatal safety standard. Used as a compliance exercise, it will produce a circular. The Lahore Times will report on what the group submits.
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