Getting girls’ hostel back on young doctors’ agenda | Pakistan Press Foundation (PPF)

Pakistan Press Foundation

Getting girls’ hostel back on young doctors’ agenda

RAWALPINDI: Forcing the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to vacate the girls’ hostel of Rawalpindi Medical College (RMC) is back on the agenda of young doctors.

“We have called a meeting of RMC students on Saturday to discuss how to get the hostel vacated,” Dr Umer Saeed, Rawalpindi president of Young Doctors Association, told Dawn.

The association and RMC students held protests for getting the hostel vacated from NAB in January this year. They were assured that the hostel, which became the NAB office in 1999, would be vacated by the end of February. As the young doctors went on strike from March 1 for higher salaries, the demand for getting the hostel vacated was put on hold.

Dr Saeed said the female students of RMC were facing immense difficulties as there was no place to accommodate them.

“Currently 205 rooms of the existing hostel accommodate 487 students,” he said. “But 34 students have been accommodated in the empty houses reserved for professors of RMC and 12 are living in servant quarters. And ten students are living in the college’s study room, which has been converted into 10 feet long and seven feet wide cabins,” said Dr Saeed.

He said the RMC was not in position to build new hostel for girls, adding that the NAB authorities had promised to vacate the building. “We will hold a protest or stage a sit-in outside the NAB office.”

Dr Saeed said the YDA’s Rawalpindi chapter would establish a social wing to assist the poor patients in the three public hospitals of the city. He said after the month long strike across the province, young doctors felt that the medical camps they established outside the hospital helped to lessen the sufferings of patients. “The social wing with help from philanthropists will arrange medicines for poor patients.”

He said most of the machinery in the government hospitals was out of order and the patients are referred to private laboratories. “We have decided to help the poor patients get medical tests free of cost.”

Source: Dawn

Date:4/16/2011