The leader of the opposition in the Sindh Assembly, Haleem Adil Sheikh, on Monday said that at the time when patients were already not getting adequate healthcare facilities at the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD), nurses, paramedical staff, and other employees of the institute had been compelled to stage protests for fulfillment of their demands.
He said it while talking to the protesting employees at the health facility to express solidarity with them. Accompanied by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) MPA Saeed Afridi, local leader Gohar Khattak and others, Sheikh assured the protesting employees that the PTI would join their protest if their genuine demands were not met.
Talking to the media, he said the Sindh government claimed that people from abroad came to the NICVD for treatment but the state of affairs at the institute was extremely distressing. “The NICVD is no longer a centre for curing hearts but has become a heartbreaking hospital,” he remarked.
Due to the nonavailability of stunts in the institute, a number of patients were treated with balloon angioplasty from 17 to 25 September that amounted to deceiving the patients and a clear violation of medical ethics, he said. He added that the annual budget of the NICVD was Rs12 billion and in the last few years the institute had also received additional funds amounting to Rs41 billion but still the institute was being run on Zakat for previous six months.
He alleged that Rs7 billion from the annual budget of the institute had been embezzled because the Sindh government had turned the NICVD into a hotbed of corruption and its executive director Dr Nadeem Qamar was the patron of thieves.
Sheikh went on to allege that Dr Qamar’s monthly salary was more than Rs6 million and he had received Rs256 million in the last three years while other directors of the NICVD were also getting lucrative monthly allowance, but the workers were being denied health risk, utility and other allowances as well as arrears.
Around seven thousand employees of the NICVD were entitled to get a monthly allowance of Rs17,000 each while there were arrears of over Rs100 million but they were not being paid to the employees who served as the frontline workers, he said.
The opposition leader maintained that a number of corruption cases against the NICVD were under proceedings in courts and a legal firm of a Pakistan Peoples Party leader was paid Rs16 million for defending corruption.
“Meanwhile millions of rupees were spent on unnecessary air travel and several favoured people were inducted on exorbitant salaries but NICVD employees who raised voice for their legitimate rights were coerced by the administration,” Sheikh said. He termed it sheer injustice to the employees who put their lives and well-being at risk for service to humanity.
The opposition leader stated that the Omicron variant of Covid-19 was spreading at an alarming rate in Sindh and the positivity ratio had touched 15 per cent but the vaccination ratio in Sindh was the least across Pakistan.