PESHAWAR, Oct 15: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government is installing biometric system at major hospitals in the province to ensure presence of employees on duty and thus, ensuring better patient care.

`The government has issued instructions to all its hospitals to install biometric system to ensure attendance of employees and serve the people in a better way,` a relevant official told Dawn on Tuesday.

According to him, the system has already been installed at the Accident and Emergency Department (A&ED) of the Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar, where it has so far delivered the goods.

The official said LRH was in the process of installing 12 biometric machines to ensure that its 4,000-plus employees come to duty and leave on time.

When contacted, LRH Chief Executive Officer Professor Arshad Javed said the biometric system had been installed at the deputy medical superintendent`s office, where employees recorded their attendances first in the morning and then in the afternoon after dutyhours.

`The system is excellent because it provides us with information about the duty of all doctors, paramedics, nurses and Class IV staff.

After more such machines are installed, we will be able to ensure attendance of all employees on duty,` he said.

According to Professor Arshad, one biometric machine costs Rs34,000 but offers huge benefits.

`We would have installed the facility for all employees until now but since there are certain codal formalities to be fulfilled under the prescribed rules, that could not happen,` he said.

The LRH chief executive officer said the hospital had purchased the system for A&ED as the law allowed it to spend less than Rs40,000 on its own but for more money, it had to float tenders and award contract to the one offering the lowest bid.

He said it was one-time exercise to feed details of the employees to the machines along with their thumb impressions and fingerprints.

According to Professor Arshad, the machine will point out if someone tries to file attendance of other.

`The system will be installed in the entire hospital within a month after which the employees` data will be fed to it. The device will record time of arrival and departure of the employees. A strategy has been developed to implement the programme to the benefit of patients,` he said.

Officials at the health directorate said the other three teaching hospitals of the province, KhyberTeaching Hospital and Hayatabad Medical Complex in Peshawar and Ayub Teaching Hospital in Abbottabad, were also in the process of installing the biometric system to ensure presence of staff on duty.

`The Pakistan Tehreek-iInsaf-led government is keen to strengthen health system for better patient care. We (the health department) have around 600,000 employees but only 20 per cent patients` visit government health facilities,` an official said.

He said the patients avoided visiting government health facilities due to rampant absenteeism and preferred private facilities for better services.

According to him, by and large, the hospital employees put their signatures or recorded thumb impression on register manually whether they come late or leave early.

`Even employees are able to put their attendance after a week or even more but the new system will record their time spent on duty, he said.

The officials said the data of the staff attendance would be fed into the information technology systems of the respective hospitals on the basis of which disciplinary action would be taken against the absentees.

They said so far, there was no attendance system for doctors at the hospital and therefore, they stayed away from duty at will.

The officials expressed the hope that the new system would cover all employees regardless of their job status.