Public sector hospitals - Clean drinking water facility not available

By Our Staff Reporter

KARACHI - The underground water reservoirs and overhead tanks in the city’s major public hospitals were not being properly maintained for the last several years and as such patients visiting the health facilities have no choice but to drink impure water, it was reliably learnt.

An official of Civil Hospital Karachi (CHK), on the condition of anonymity, said that there is no systematic procedure to ensure cleaning of the hospital’s overhead and underground water tanks periodically.

He regretted that although around 3,500 to 4,000 patients, belonging to Karachi and different parts of Sindh and Balochistan, visit the hospital’s different OPDs daily, there is no proper arrangement to ensure that the water they are drinking there is clean and fit for human consumption.

He said that majority of poor patients and their attendants visiting the health facility have no choice but to drink water being supplied through the hospital’s overhead tanks, while some of them prefer to buy mineral water. “Even the residents of the hospital’s staff colony are getting their water supply from the overhead tanks which have not been cleaned since long,” he claimed.

Moreover, almost similar situation has been prevailing at other public sector hospitals of the city as their overhead water tanks and underground reservoirs are not periodically cleaned, the sources claimed, saying these health facilities include Jinnah Postgraduate Centre, Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, Services Hospital, National Institute of Child Health, Sindh government hospitals dispensaries and maternity homes being run under the administrative control of Karachi Metropolitan Corporation.     

Meanwhile, Pakistan Paramedical Staff Association’s (PPMSA) Sindh chapter president Niaz Hussain Bhutto also claimed that water being supplied to other major hospitals across Sindh was also not clean and hygienic as they have no system to clean their water supplying reservoirs on regular basis.

He demanded that Karachi Water and Sewerage Board and water utilities of other cities of the province to supply chlorinated water to all hospitals so that patients and their attendants might not become victim of water-borne diseases.