PESHAWAR: The public-private partnership initiative of health department continues to suffer as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Foundation has failed to select new organisations to take over seven hospitals, whose contracts have expired one and half years ago.

Health Foundation, a public sector entity established under Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Foundation Act, 2016, has been outsourcing those hospitals, which are not performing because doctors, nurses and paramedics don’t want to be posted there.

So far, Health Foundation has outsourced 19 hospitals to private organisations, mostly in merged districts to improve services, according to sources. Of these, the contracts of seven hospitals with Health Foundation expired in June 2023 that was extended temporarily by the provincial cabinet.

As their contracts continued to get extended from time to time, Health Foundation remained busy in selecting new organisations through tendering for running the hospitals. Health Foundation has been asked by provincial cabinet to select new partners so that the contracts of the seven hospitals could be inked.

Contracts of seven outsourced hospitals have expired

Health Foundation (HF) completed the tendering process in January last year but could not move forward to sign agreements with the selected organisations because its Board of Governors (BoG) was nonexistent. BoG is approving authority for awarding contracts of hospitals to new partners.

The health department notified BoG of HF in September last year that rekindled hopes that the selected partners would be given charge of the hospitals where the older partners were facing financial issues and were not willing to run the hospitals anymore. In at least three of the seven hospitals, the partners have slashed healthcare services and patients receive only emergency services.

All the 19 hospitals want of the government to pay them Rs1.5 billion, which also include Rs1 billion of the seven hospitals, whose contracts have ended.

The new BoG in its meeting early this month, rejected the selection of partners to operate the seven hospitals. It caused a serious blow to the public-private partnership initiative of health department, sources said.

They said that BoG of HF decided to refloat tenders for selection of new partners that would take many months and the partners whose contracts had expired couldn’t run the hospitals as stop-gap-arrangements because they weren’t getting money.

The managing director of HF, Dr Adnan Taj, has also written a letter to adviser to chief minister on health that the decision to declare the selection of new partners for seven hospitals by BoG was illegal because the quorum was incomplete.

He said that the meeting was conducted without fulfilling the quorum requirement under Section 5, Sub-section 4 of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Foundation Act, 2016, which stated that “six members shall constitute the quorum for a meeting of the board”. He said that the meeting was conducted without the quorum and only five members of BoG were present on the occasion.

BoG chairperson Dr Shabana Haider told Dawn that meeting of board held as per law but the managing director was not issuing its minutes to clear the situation. “There were experts in the meeting outside HF who also suggested it and all the members unanimously agreed to it. So there was no illegal thing,” he said.

Dr Adnan Taj told Dawn that he could not issue minutes of an ‘illegal’ meeting. He said that they had done hard work to select partners and hand over the hospitals to them. “Patients are suffering in the areas where the hospitals are located,” he said.

Published in Dawn, January 31st, 2025

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