PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has appointed Dr Rehana Rahim as chairperson of Board of Governors of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Foundation along with four new members to ensure smooth operations of the hospitals outsourced to private organisations in the province.

Chief Minister Ali Amin Khan Gandapur had accepted the resignation of Dr Shabana Haider as chairperson of Health Foundation (HF) on March 4 due to which its operations of had come to a standstill.

The four new members of Health Foundation BoG include Amanullah, Mohammad Arifeen, Momina Basit and Gul Afzal, according to a notification. With the new appointments, the number of private members of Health Foundation BoG reached seven. Two official members of the board were already appointed. Now the total number of BoG members is nine and the quorum is seven.

Officials in health department told Dawn that HF had suffered a great deal owing to non-existence of complete BoG. They saidthat the complete BoG was expected to put things on track.

The meeting of the BoG is expected this week wherein managing director will brief participants regarding HF`s mandate, its functions, rules and regulation along with details of hospitals outsourced so far and the issues faced by the foundation.

The BoG of HF has been incomplete for several months but Dr Shabana Haider assumed the role of chairperson in September last year. However, she developed differences with Dr Adnan Taj, the managing director (MD) of the foundation, over the legality of selection of new contractors for seven hospitals.

Dr Shabana had rejected the contract and hinted at initiating selection process afresh whereas Dr Adnan Taj had insisted that the contract should be awarded to the selected organisations because the whole process had been completed as per law. HF had completed selection of new organisations for outsourcing state-run hospitals but it couldn`t be materialised owing to nonexistence of the chairperson of BoG, the final authority to grant approvalforthe purpose.

HF, a public sector entity established under Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Foundation Act, 2016, has been outsourcing those hospitals, which are not performing well because doctors, nurses and paramedics don`t want to be postedthere.

So far, it has contracted out 19 hospitals to private organisations, mostly in merged districts to improve services. Of these, the contracts of seven hospitals with HF expired in June 2023.

The contracts were extended temporarily after the approval of provincial cabinet.

Meanwhile, HF continued the process for selecting new organisationsthrough tendering as per the provincial cabinet`s instruction to select new partners so that the contracts of the seven hospitals could be inked.

Owing to non-presence of BoG chairperson, the public-private partnership (PPP) initiative suffered as the contracts ofthe partnersrunningthosehospitalshad already expired and the old partners were requested to continue as stop-gap arrangements till the selection of new organisations.

The health department notified BoG of HF in September last year that rekindled hopes that the selected partners would be given charge of those hospitals where the older partners were facing financial issues and were not willing to run the health1acilities anymore.

In five of the seven hospitals, p a r t n e r s h a y e s 1 a s h e d healthcare s e r v i c e s a n dpatients receive only emergency services.

The new BoG of HF, in its meeting early in February, rejected the selection of partners to operate the seven hospitals, which was a serious blow to public-private partnership initiative of health department, sources said.

The managing director of HF has also written a letter to health department that the decision by BoG chairperson Dr Shabana to reject the selection of new partners for running the seven hospitals was illegal as complete board had total nine members, including two government and seven private ones.

He said that six would be complete forum to take decisions but the selection oforganisationsfor seven hospitals was rejected by the BoG when it had five members.

Sources in health department told Dawn that the new BoG was likely to approve the selection of organisations for seven hospitals because starting a new process would take at least three months and the old organisations could not wait that long.