Health secretary’s removal raises questions over govt action on Pims inferno

• Aslam Ghori visits Pims three to four times before fire: sources.
• Sources say PM Office denies receiving reports on Ghori’s actions.
• Conflicting accounts raise questions over Pims accountability.

ISLAMABAD: The health secretary may have been removed prematurely after the prime minister was allegedly not given complete information about his visits to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) and actions, according to sources close to the secretary.

Sources close to the removed health secretary Aslam Ghori said on Saturday that the secretary had visited Pims three to four times during the week preceding the fire and had regularly reported his findings to the PM’s Office. A PM Office source, however, insisted that the office was not aware of any such report or actions related to Pims taken by the secretary, The News reported on Sunday.

Sources close to Ghori said that the secretary’s first visit was on Aug 21, when he was accompanied by his staff officer, Dr Shahid Karim. During the visit, he met Rana Imran Sikandar and five to six other doctors at Pims. According to the sources, a report on the visit was personally submitted to the PM House at around 6:30pm the same day, along with a report prepared by the Pims Executive Director (ED).

The sources said the secretary visited Pims again on Aug 23 at around 3:00pm to supervise the assignment given to him. The Pims ED and Head of Radiology were also present during the visit. A report was subsequently sent to the PM House the same evening.

They said that when the secretary received information about the fire on Aug 27, he immediately reached Pims and met all relevant officials. He prepared an initial report at the ICU on a computer available there and sent it to the PM’s staff before 11:00am.

According to the sources, the minister for parliamentary affairs also reached the hospital, obtained a copy of the secretary’s initial report and subsequently responded to questions from the media. The secretary remained with the minister during the interaction before leaving for the PM House, where a meeting had already been scheduled.

The sources said that during the meeting, the prime minister ordered the secretary’s removal, apparently on the basis of information that did not fully reflect his visits and actions at Pims.

The secretary’s close sources believe that the prime minister was not “informed” about the secretary’s visits to Pims and his response to the situation.

Interestingly, sources in the PM’s Office said that the prime minister had spoken to both the health secretary and the health minister but none of them told him about the secretary’s visits and actions related to Pims.

This raises questions about why the health secretary was subsequently removed if he had in fact visited Pims three-four times during the preceding week and had reached the hospital immediately after being informed about the fire. Another unresolved question concerns an earlier fire incident at Pims last month. The issue reportedly came up in a meeting on Saturday, with the health minister telling the prime minister that he had not been informed about that incident. Sources close to Ghori said that he was not informed of the July fire in the Pims children hospital.

The conflicting accounts have, therefore, raised a broader question whether responsibility for the Pims failures was correctly fixed, or whether the prime minister took action against the health secretary before receiving the complete picture.

Originally published in The News