By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI- Abbasi Shaheed Hospital (ASH) of Karachi Metropolian Corporation (KMC) continued to face acute shortage of medicines as the civic agency’s management has failed to meet the hospital’s requirement of medicines since last several years, it was reliably learnt.
Sources told Medical News that ASH has been facing acute shortage of life-saving drugs as the KMC administration is unable to supply required quota of medicines to the city’s major teaching hospital.
“Even the hospital’s emergency department is also facing shortage of drugs,” the sources said, adding that such a situation has forced patients to purchase medicines from private medical stores.
Perssisting medicine crisis has resulted in decreasing number of OPD patients whereas laboratory tests were also not being carried out due to non-supply of X-ray films and other diagnostics kits, sources claimed.
An official of the hospital’s administration department, who wished not to be quoted, said that due to non-supply of drugs and unavailability of diagnostic facilities the patients generally prefer to go to other public sector’s healthcare facilities.
He said supply of food to the indoor patients have also been stopped from August 2014 owing to financial crisis of KMC. However, the hospital’s administration was making its efforts to provide best possible treatment facilities to the poor segment of the society from its limited resources.
According to details, around 2,500 patients visits the hospital’s OPD daily basis.
In fact, the ASH was not only meeting the needs of patients from Karachi, but a good number of patients from the interior of Sindh, Balochistan and other parts of the country were also availing healthcare facilities at the hospital.
KMC Health & Medical Services senior director Dr Salma Kausar Ali said that civic agency becaue of paucity of funds was unable to supply 100 per cent medicines to the hospital.
She, however, claimed that the drugs and X-ray films were continously being supplied to the hospital, saying it was unfair to say that KMC had stopped supplying medicines to the hospital.