Completion of Mother, Child Hospital need of the hour.

Byline: Aamir Yasin

RAWALPINDI -- The much-needed Mother and Child Hospital has been lying incomplete for the last 15 years and will take a few more months for completion.

With the existing health facilities running out of space, the hospital has become need of the hour.

Holy Family Hospital (HFH) has total 230 beds in its gynaecology ward but it has to accommodate 360 to 390 patients. Similarly, Benazir Bhutto Hospital (BBH) has 50 beds but more than 70 patients are admitted to the gyane ward whereas at the DHQ hospital a bed is shared by two to three patients.

'I came from Taxila but there was no bed available and I had to share the bed with a woman who had given birth to a baby boy in the morning,' said Sobia Bibi, a patient at the gynae ward of HFH.She said she could not afford heavy fees of private clinics so her husband brought her to the HFH. She said she purchased all medicines from the market.

Allied hospitals running out of space as one bed is shared by two to three patients

Mohammad Nisar, a resident of Dhoke Ratta, said he took his wife to the BBH last night where she had to share the bed with another woman.

'I have no option but to use the facility. After delivery, my wife returned home within 24 hours,' he said.

He said the government hospital was meant for patients who could not afford private facilities.

Shahida Saleem, a gynae patient at DHQ hospital, said there was no bed for the expectant mothers in the government hospitals.

Besides, she said, medicines were not available in medical stores of the hospitals as they gave only life saving drugs.

A senior doctor at the DHQ hospital told Dawn that the government hospitals needed improvement especially gyane wards as daily more than 300 patients visited the hospitals but due to shortage of space two or three women shared a single bed.

He said either the government should increase beds in the gynae ward or establish more mother and child hospitals.

'The Mother and Child Hospital should be completed at the earliest to share the burden of allied hospitals,' he said.

Work on the hospital was inaugurated on April 8, 2005, by the then prime minister Shaukat Aziz after the project was approved by the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec). But the project came to a halt soon after the new governments sworn in at...