Chairman Senate Standing Committee on Defence, Senator said that the National Institute of Child Health is rendering unmatched services in providing modern treatment facilities for ailing children.
KARACHI: Chairman Senate Standing Committee on Defence, Senator Nisar Memon, has said that the National Institute of Child Health (NICH), Karachi, is rendering unmatched services in providing modern treatment facilities for ailing children.
The Sindh province needs to have more such hospitals where ratio of diseases among children is higher with non-availability of healthcare of required quality, he observed, during a visit to the NICH the other day.
During the visit, the senator was briefed in detail about the facilities being provided at the NICH and its future plans. He was informed that the NICH is the first children’s hospital of Pakistan established in 1972. It is a teaching tertiary care hospital under the Federal Ministry of Health. It started as a 100-bed hospital and now has 435 beds with several different specialities like round-the-clock emergency services, intensive care unit, burns unit, dialysis and renal unit, cancer ward, new born babies ward, endocrine department, paediatric surgical units (2), paediatric medical units (3), out patient department, pathology department, radiology department, anaesthesia department.
Nisar Memon was told that new facilities are being introduced such as MRI, modern operation theatres, besides expansion in dialysis services, state-of-the-art pathology department, cytogenetic laboratory, and chest/pulmonary unit. All these services, Nisar was told, are being provided free of cost with generous budget from the Ministry of Health, Islamabad and with NGO support.
In 2005 over 235,000 patients visited NICH, more than 12,000 operations conducted and 30,000 patients admitted to different wards. Nisar Memon went round various wards and talked to children under treatment and distributed Eid gifts among them.
He said that the Sindh province is lucky to have such a modern hospital in a mega city like Karachi but there is need to have such hospitals, may be on a smaller scale in central and upper Sindh to facilitate the patients who cannot afford to come to Karachi for treatment of their ailing kids.
He said majority of them could not afford the expenses of travelling all the way to Karachi and then stay here. Nisar Memon said that as representative of the Sindh province in the Senate, he would strive to move the concerned authorities to allocate funds for creating specialities in Sindh’s major hospital for treatment of diseases of children and establishment of exclusive hospitals for them wherever possible.
