New principal orders surprise inspections of wards, emergency and OPDs at one of Lahore’s busiest hospitals; findings will go to him weekly but are not due to be made public.
LAHORE: The Lahore General Hospital has set up a three-member vigilance committee to carry out surprise inspections of its wards, emergency department and outpatient clinics, as the hospital’s management moves to tighten discipline after suspending four officials for negligence.
Prof Dr Jodat Saleem, principal of Ameer-ud-Din Medical College and the hospital, constituted the committee on Nov. 1. It will be chaired by Prof Dr Hassan Suleman, a paediatric gastroenterologist, with Associate Professor of Pathology Dr Amna Asif and Senior Registrar of Orthopaedic Surgery Dr Mubashar Farhan as members.
The committee follows disciplinary action announced over the weekend. The hospital suspended four officials with immediate effect for “negligence, lack of interest and dereliction of duty”, served a show-cause notice on a sanitary inspector and sought written explanations from three other employees, The Nation reported. It did not name those suspended.
Medical Superintendent Prof Dr Faryad Hussain also replaced the additional medical superintendent for the emergency department, Dr Sinaan Mustafa, with Dr Ambreen Muqaddas taking charge of the evening shift. Sanitary staff were told to wear prescribed uniforms or be marked absent.
Saleem was appointed principal on a regular basis on Sept. 25 in a reshuffle of the heads of several major teaching institutions, according to Minute Mirror.
The committee will make regular and unannounced visits to wards, the emergency department, OPDs and other units, and review staff attendance, discipline, patient care, medical records and stock.
It will monitor the attendance, deployment and cleanliness standards of janitorial staff and check whether security guards are present and alert. Its remit also covers round-the-clock cleanliness, waste disposal, sanitation and infection-control protocols, and facilities for patients’ attendants, working with the hospital’s administrative doctors.
A weekly report of observations, action taken and recommendations will go to the principal, and any serious negligence must be reported immediately. All departments have been told to cooperate and comply promptly with its instructions.
“Effective monitoring is essential for improving institutional performance,” Saleem said, adding that the aim was a patient-friendly environment in line with Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif’s health vision.
LGH is one of Punjab’s largest public hospitals and houses the Punjab Institute of Neurosciences, where the chief minister marked World Stroke Day last week. Its emergency department handles about 3,000 patients a day across 280 beds, Dawn reported last year, citing hospital figures, in a report that also described junior doctors filling posts meant for senior teaching staff.
The hospital has faced a run of incidents this autumn. About 70 people were evacuated after a fire on Sept. 1 with no casualties, weeks after an inquiry exposed fire safety failures at Lahore’s five biggest government hospitals. Later that month, an impostor posing as a doctor was caught on the premises, and police had earlier arrested two mobile phone thieves there, underlining the security gaps the committee has been told to watch.
Patient complaints are not limited to one hospital. A Chief Minister’s Special Monitoring Unit survey of 1,976 patients at Punjab teaching hospitals, reported by Dawn in January, found about 36pc said they had not received free medicines and had to buy them privately, and about 31pc said duty doctors had not treated them properly.
All three committee members hold full clinical or teaching posts, and the order does not say how much time they will set aside for inspections in a hospital of LGH’s size, or whether they will have dedicated support staff.
Its weekly reports go only to the principal. The hospital has not said whether findings or action taken will be shared with patients, the health department or the public, which would allow the committee’s impact to be measured.
The Supreme Court ordered regular inspections of operation theatres last month to prevent medical negligence, and the provincial government has relied increasingly on surprise inspections, including chief minister’s inspection team raids on district hospitals. Whether an internal committee can match the pressure of outside scrutiny will show in LGH’s wards in the upcoming months.
Leave a Reply