COVID-19 pandemic: Punjab isn’t panicked?

ISLAMABAD: The Punjab government feels that the COVID-19 pandemic is being dealt with largely by the existing medical professionals, if the number of new doctors it has recruited to cope with the situation is any guide.

It has not gone for a large-scale recruitment of doctors and has hired the professionals only as per the actual requirements in various areas. Sometime back, Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar had announced that his administration would employ at least 10,000 new doctors in view of the coronavirus emergency.

A total of 376 new male and female doctors have so far been engaged considering the precise requirements of different regions of the province, a senior Punjab government official told The News.

“The yardstick to gauge the number of additional medical professionals needed in a certain city is the number of COVID-19 patients in the intensive care units and general corona wards of public hospitals of that area. If this number goes up significantly, new recruitments are hurriedly made to tackle the emergency,” the official said.

Of the new 376 appointments, as many as 268 doctors have been hired in Lahore, sixty-nine in Rawalpindi, twenty-one in Gujrat, eight in Sargodha and ten in Multan as per the recommendations of the vice chancellors of medical universities of these areas.

A total of 442 doctors were cleared for employment in the walk-in interviews. Of them, as many as 146 doctors were not found eligible due to expired Pakistan Medical and Dental Council certificates or non-provision of documents.

Similarly, the Rawalpindi committee recommended 71 doctors for appointment. Two of them were found not eligible. From Gujrat, twenty-eight doctors were proposed for hiring. Of them seven were found ineligible. Likewise, the Sargodha committee recommended 10 doctors while two of them were found not eligible. From Multan recommendations numbered 53 and only ten appointments were made as recommended by the vice chancellor of the Nishter Medical University.

The official said that only 28 eligible candidates, recommended by the Lahore committee, are left out of total recommended list by it. They will be engaged if the number of patients considerably went up in Lahore.

He said that a specially constituted forum of the Punjab government, the corona expert advisory body, reviews the requirements of every region keeping in view the load of new COVID-19 patients and recommends fresh recruitments.

The official said that the lists of the recommended medical officers were sent by the committees of these major cities to the Specialized Healthcare & Medical Education (SHC&ME) Department where the decision to make actual appointments is made.

When contacted, SHC&ME Secretary Barrister Nabeel Awan told The News that the Punjab government keeps reviewing the situation every time and rushes to meet the requirements of fresh recruitment of medical professionals and other staff in the areas where they are needed for receiving a greater number of patients. “We don’t want to waste resources by making unnecessary recruitments.”

Another official said that a few months back, dozens of medical consultants were hired on ad hoc basis in Rawalpindi to treat dengue patients. Since, there have been no dengue patients, these doctors have not been paid any salary. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit Pakistan, there have been demands to the SHC&ME and recommendations from concerned authorities that these consultants should be assigned the corona duty to get double salary as being given to the doctors doing duty for corona patients. But SHC&ME has refused to do so saying that they have not been trained for specialised job.