PESHAWAR: Ghulam Ismail, 77, a patient with a hip fracture and admitted in one of the tertiary care hospitals of the city had no other option but to leave the facility for a laboratory test to prepare himself to be operated in the hospital. Lying on a steel stretcher with a pillow supporting the broken hip joint of the old man, his son Sarbaland and a relative were pushing the stretcher on a bumpy surface outside the Khyber Teaching Hospital (KTH), the second largest hospital of the province. The old man had an operation and doctors asked him to do the Echocardiogram (ECHO), a test necessary for old patients to be operated. However, the attendants were informed that if they wait for the ECHO test to be done in the hospital, they would have to wait at least for three days because of the burden on the lone operative ECHO machine of the hospital, thanks to Sehat Ka Insaf, a slogan of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Sarbaland had to move his father to a private laboratory outside the hospital to make him prepared for the next day operation of his hip bone fracture. He took his father in a stretcher, who had to bear the pain caused due to the dilapidated condition of the surface from hospital to the private facility. “We are poor people, we can’t afford to take our father in a private ambulance to the nearby laboratory as they charge 1000 rupees,” he said. A doctor working in the hospital told this reporter on the condition of anonymity that every day more than 100 patients were prescribed with ECHO test from different wards of the hospital as well as patients from outpatient department. But, he said the hospital had only one operative ECHO machine and only 35 to 50 patients could be entertained on a daily basis. The remaining patients had to go outside the hospital for the test. Zameen Khan, 98, was lucky that he had the money to hire an ambulance that took him from the hospital to the nearby laboratory. “My father is too old to be moved on a stretcher, so we had to hire an ambulance on 1000 rupees to take him to a laboratory just 500 metres away from the entrance of the KTH to get his ECHO done,” said Jan Khan. Another medic said that for pre-op assessment they had to refer the patient for an ECHO test. The hospital had two ECHO machines out of which one is out-of-order. “If we wait for the patient to get the test from a machine at the hospital, they will not be operated on their scheduled day.” He said they were fully aware of the financial constraints of patients and the fatigue of moving patients outside the hospital for the test, but they had no other option. The KTH Media Spokesperson Farhad Khan said that both ECHO machines at the hospital were operational and provided service to the patients. He added that recently, a new state of the art technology ECHO machine had also been installed in KTH at a cost of Rs.7,500,000. He added the hospital used to provide facilities to the patients within available resources. The provincial government led by PTI has allocated Rs 30 billion for health, only six per cent of the total budget of Rs 505 billion, for the fiscal year 2016-17.