Al-Shifa hospitals treated 70 pc of patients free of cost

RAWALPINDI: Some 70 per cent of total 307,000 patients attended by outpatient departments (OPDs) of four Al-Shifa Trust Eye hospitals during 2010-11 were treated free of charge.

President of Al-Shifa Trust Lieutenant General (Retd) Hamid Javaid said in a meeting, which was held to review the strategy for achievement of the targets set for the hospitals of the trust in Rawalpindi, Kohat, Sukkur and Muzaffarabad.

The meeting was told that 30,000 surgeries were carried out alongwith treatment of 307,000 patients by OPDs during the financial year 2010-11 against 25,000 surgeries and 265,000 patients benefited from the OPD services in 2009-10. Thus, the number of patients who benefited from the OPDservices went up by 15.84 per cent and the number of surgeries increased by 20 per cent during 2010-11 as compared to the previous year.

"The number of free eye camps held by the Trust hospitals went up by 23.5 per cent during 2010-11 as compared to the previous year as 289 camps were held during the year under review as compared to 234 held during the previous year," said Brigadier (Retd) Rizwan Ullah Asghar, executive director of Al-Shifa Trust Eye Hospital, Rawalpindi.

"The number of patients who benefited from the free eye camps increased by 8.9 percent as 110,000 patients were checked at 289 camps in 2010-11 as compared to 101,000 patients checked at 234 camps in2009-10 while the number of the students screened in 2010-11 went up by 20 percent as compared to the previous year as 42,000 students were screened in 2010-11 against 35,000 screened during 2009-10," he said.

He said the outpatient department of the hospital, first facility of its kind in eight districts of Azad Kashmir, had started functioning from April 11 while the first surgery was conducted on May 31, formally marking the complete functioning of the fourth eye hospital of the trust.

The 200-bed Muzaffarabad hospital, built over 6.25 acres of land, has the capacity to serve about 800 patients of all type of eye diseases and undertake 100 operations daily. Designed to cater for eye-care needs of the whole region, the construction of Al-Shifa Trust Eye Hospital in Muzaffarabad was completed at the total cost of Rs250million.