LAHORE: Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz on Friday addressed a conference of CEOs and medical superintendents where she pledged zero corruption and public service, and announced a wide-ranging set of reforms to strengthen governance, accountability and service delivery in public hospitals.
She approved the appointment of monitoring and evaluation assistants in hospitals, the digitalization of health facilitation operations and the posting of administrators and procurement officers. She said Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) were introduced to assess the performance of CEOs and MSs. A new Performance Evaluation Report (PER) system was implemented to monitor doctors’ performance, while district and tehsil hospitals across Punjab entered a paperless regime.
She directed on-call doctors to reach hospitals within 20 minutes and commended ministers, secretaries and health teams for reducing maternal mortality rates.
The chief minister reiterated her vision that no citizen of Punjab should have to travel to another city for treatment, stating that saving one life is equivalent to saving all humanity. She emphasized that the CEOs and MSs were more critical than ministers and secretaries in ensuring policy implementation.
She said public hospitals primarily served poor and vulnerable patients and stressed the need to treat them as a sacred trust. She warned that negligence by doctors or nurses could cost lives and expressed concern after seeing hospital staff using mobile phones during duty hours. She said Emergency Wards have been linked with Safe City cameras to ensure oversight, and strict restrictions have been imposed on the use of mobile phones by doctors during duty hours. She noted that Punjab’s health budget has increased significantly from Rs399 billion to Rs630 billion, adding that resources must translate into visible improvements for patients. She said over 1,500 doctors have joined public hospitals, and Rs22 billion in previous dues have been cleared to maintain uninterrupted medicine supplies.
She directed hospital administrations to ensure availability of medicines, functional equipment, proper cleanliness and improved patient management systems, including colour-coded triage bays. She said pharmaceutical representatives would not be allowed inside hospitals, and vigilance teams were actively monitoring facilities across districts. She said hospital leadership positions were not privileges but a public trust, urging officials to remain among patients to better understand their suffering and ensure meaningful improvements in healthcare delivery.
Meanwhile, Maryam Nawaz expressed gratitude over the successful provision of free heart surgeries to more than 10,000 children from across Pakistan under the Chief Minister Children Heart Surgery Program.
Under the program, the highest number of free heart surgeries were performed for children from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (425), followed by Azad Jammu & Kashmir (250), Federal Areas (107), Gilgit-Baltistan (34), Balochistan (28), and Sindh (27).
The CM also inaugurated the new ICU at Children’s Hospital Lahore. During her visit, she toured the ICU, met children under treatment, and expressed affection for them. She attended a ceremony marking the completion of 10,000 surgeries under the Children Heart Surgery Program. She sat among the children and warmly interacted with young heart-surgery patients.
Provincial Minister for Specialized Healthcare Khawaja Salman Rafique briefed her that 10,331 surgeries have been completed so far under the program. Vice Chancellor Masood Sadiq informed that every year, around 50,000 children were born with heart disease in Pakistan, of whom 25,000 require immediate surgery. The chief minister increased the number of cardiac surgeons at the Children’s Hospital to 12 and cardiac physicians to 34. Through the Chief Minister Transplant Card, 800 cochlear transplants and 200 bone marrow transplants for children have also been completed.
A special documentary highlighting the Chief Minister Children Heart Surgery Program was also presented at the ceremony.
