Last month, three children allegedly died due to incorrect injections in the children’s ward of a government hospital in Khanewal, and a nurse was arrested for their deaths. After the nurse’s arrest, nurses in government hospitals across Punjab began protests. In these protests, nurses demanded their colleague’s immediate release and announced continuing the protest series until her release.
A few days before the Khanewal incident, news of a fire in the children’s ward of the Teaching Hospital in Sahiwal emerged, resulting in eleven children’s deaths. After this incident, Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz visited the hospital and, displaying her typical trickery, had the hospital’s principal and Medical Superintendent, among other staff, arrested merely for her political publicity. Due to the incompetency of health departments and continuous budget cuts, the healthcare situation is grim, and hospitals are in disarray.
A few months before the Khanewal and Sahiwal incidents, the roof of the surgical ward at Aziz Bhatti Hospital in Gujarat collapsed, resulting in several patients being buried under debris. Using such incidents as justification, the government is paving the way to accelerate the process of hospital privatisation. The real culprits for all such incidents in hospitals are not ordinary doctors, paramedics, and nurses. Rather, the real responsibility lies with the state, government, and health department bureaucracy. After that, if anyone is responsible, it’s the hospital’s CEO, principal, and administration.
All medicines that come to the hospital include approval from health department ministers and bureaucracy, along with hospital administration, including the hospital’s CEO, principal, and MS.
Hospital bosses are actually state puppets who tell the government new ways to privatise and create divisions among hospital staff. Later, these same bosses get some big positions as a reward for flattery and brokerage.
For the past several decades, the government has neither built any significant new public hospitals in Pakistan nor made any new recruitments of nurses, paramedics, and doctors. Also, starving hospitals with budgets, they forgo maintenance work that results in accidents, like one happened at Sahiwal Teaching Hospital (because the fire was caused by a short circuit). This accident would never have happened, and eleven children could have been saved from dying if proper maintenance had been done. Similarly, if medicines were available at Khanewal Teaching Hospital, those three children’s deaths would not have occurred.
Every government coming to Pakistan has followed the same pattern before selling any public institution, that institution and its staff are completely discredited in the public eye so that when the institution is sold, there’s no resistance from the public. Even if the concerned institution’s staff resists, they don’t receive public sympathies and support. This makes the process of privatising the public organisation easier. We have seen this phenomenon happening in the case of Khanewal where staff were scapegoated to accelerate privatisation.
The PTUS strongly condemns the Khanewal, Sahiwal, and all incidents of this nature and wants to give this message to healthcare and hospital staff across Punjab that they will have to win public support and support of workers from other sectors to fight the menace of privatisation, along with getting all their justified demands accepted.
To fight effectively, young doctors and nurses and other healthcare staff should wage a joint struggle. Basically demanding proper salary increases commensurate with inflation. Demand better hospital equipment and medicines for patients, alongside recruiting new doctors and staff to fill the vacancies lying idle for many years. A demand to build new hospitals should also be made to provide better healthcare facilities to the increasing population.
Along with this, health department workers will have to start a joint anti-privatisation movement with workers of all other public institutions targeted for privatisation, such as government schools, energy sector workers, water supply workers, railway workers, transport and airline workers, etc. Only through a joint workers’ struggle can this bloody onslaught of privatisation be confronted
