Karachi: Sindh Chief Minister, Syed Murad Ali Shah, has formally launched the largest paediatric intensive care facility in the province at the government-run Children’s Hospital in the Korangi area of Karachi.
The paediatric intensive care facility with 28 beds and 52 incubators has been built under the aegis of the newly established Sindh Institute of Child Health and Neonatology (SICHN).
The CM noted that more such public health facilities had to be built given the alarming situation of neonatal mortality rate in Pakistan as out of 1,000 newborns 45.6 infants lost their lives.
He said that up to 80 per cent of these deaths could be prevented by building more treatment facilities.
He appreciated that the newly launched paediatric intensive care facility had achieved a remarkable success rate of 90 per cent. While the average success rate of the other health treatment services at the hospital is 80 per cent.
Shah noted that all the incubators at the hospitals were occupied showing that there was a massive demand for intensive care facilities for the survival of the infants whose health is compromised due to birth-related issues.
He said the facilities available for neonatal intensive care at big private hospitals in Karachi even if combined couldn’t compete with the overall treatment capacity of the newly launched Children’s Hospital in the public sector.
He noted that a private hospital could charge up to Rs100,000 per day for the intensive care services for the survival of a newborn as the same treatment facility was provided free of charge at the newly launched public sector health facility.
He appreciated that the SICHN in the next step would build similar neonatal health facilities in six cities of the province. Shah said that paediatric intensive care facilities would ultimately be available in every district of the province so that people from rural Sindh shouldn’t come to Karachi for getting such specialised health services.
He assured the audience at the launching ceremony that his government would allocate a sum of Rs3.3 billion in the next budget for building more such paediatric health facilities in different parts of the province.
