The forcible occupation of rooms by a group of doctors in the newly built doctors hostel of the Lady Reading Hospital has triggered controversy among junior doctors who have accused the LRH administration of handling the situation poorly.
The controversy generated on March 26 after talks between the administration and the disgruntled doctors ended without achieving any result.
The Young Doctors’ Association (YDA) alleged that doctors residing elsewhere as well as some doctors of other hospitals had occupied the rooms without proper allotment. They demanded that new allotment should be made after cancelling the previous ones.
They came down hard on chief executive of LRH, Dr Arshad Javed for showing ignorance about the whole episode when YDA office-bearers contacted him to settle the issue amicably.
PDA’s LRH unit president Dr Nadir Khan said the association was concerned over the illegal occupation of rooms. “We tried our best to dissuade the angry doctors from occupying the rooms, but they did not pay any heed to our repeated requests. We admit that it was a mistake on the part of the doctors, but at the same time the PDA thinks that this could have been averted had the administration tackled the issue judiciously,” he said.
When contacted, LRH Medical Superintendent Dr Rahim Jan Afridi said that two years back the hospital administration constituted a committee that had proper representation of the junior doctors to oversee and resolve the accommodation problems of the doctors. “It worked transparently for about six months, but later anomalies were reported in the allotment,” he said, adding that this led him to dissolve the committee.
He said a new committee had been formed to look after the issue of doctors’ accommodation. “The new building has not been formally handed over to the hospital administration as the electricity transformer has not been installed,” he said.
He said that both Provincial Doctors Association’s LRH chapter and Young Doctors Association had disassociated themselves from the doctors who occupied the rooms.
Dr Rahim Jan Afridi said he was hopeful that the issue would be resolved in a few days. “The hospital administration will soon get the illegally occupied rooms vacated and re-allot them on merit,” he concluded.
