LAHORE: The Punjab health department`s plan to send postgraduate residents (PGRs) from teaching institutions to district headquarters hospitals (DHQs) for three months on rotational basis is not a new initiative but revival of former chief minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi government`s Punjab Safe Motherhood Initiative Project (PSMIP).

The PSMIP (2003-2009) had successfully rotated PGRs from the King Edward Medical College to Sheikhupura DHQ and Muridke THQ and was later replicated by the Fatima Jinnah Medical College in Nankana Sahib and Rawalpindi Medical College in Chakwal.

The project offered obstetric and gynae services to the patients in rural and peripheral areas round-the-clock.

However, the Shahbaz Sharif government disbanded this project after coming into power.

Pakistan Tehreelei-Insaf Chairman`s advisor Dr Yasmin Rashid, who was the author and project-director of PSMIP, has strongly reacted to the Punjab government`s claim and said it had actually suspended the initiative.

`The then health secretary, Fawad Hassan Fawad, deprived patients of specialised services in rural and peripheral areas for the past eight years and now the Shahbaz Sharif government wants to restart the project on exactly the same pattern, calling it its own initiative, Dr Yasmin said.

She demanded that Sharif brothers` blue-eyed bureaucrat Fawad Hassan Fawad should be held accountable on technical grounds. `The Shahbaz Sharif government is now trying to reinvent the wheel,` she said.

She said the PSMIP had attracted female PGRs to peripheral areas by offering them Rs20,000 stipend way back in 2003, beneñt of the service in their training, accommodation, security and other privileges. The project was launched when a Pakistani woman was dying of pregnancy-related complications every 20 minutes, she added.

Ms Rashid said as many as three third-party validation reports had lauded the project and recommended its replication in all medical colleges as well as in all specialties. `The health department during the PSMIP period had held three meetings with the College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan (CPSP), wherein the latter had given a commitment that it would send PGRs of all specialties to peripheral areas as soon as the department would upgrade the DHQ hospitals across the province,` she asserted.