Daily Times

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan Monday said that Supreme Court Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar was performing the duties of the government.

“The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government welcomes the chief justice’s visit. Unlike other provinces, we want the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to visit us and take stock of our performance. We want the chief justice to assess how we have performed,” Khan said while addressing the media in Islamabad.

He added, “We want the chief justice to assess if there is a difference in the way the province functions now, in comparison to the past. We simply said that we would make existing systems better.”

Imran stressed he wanted the people to know the measures that the KP government had taken to improve the lives of people.

“In the past 40 years, no one has brought any reforms to hospitals in KP,” he said, adding that his government had achieved results that the past governments had failed to accomplish. “Only our government brought health reforms to the country,” claimed the PTI chief.

Giving an overview of the healthcare system, the PTI head honcho said that there were 12,000 doctors working in the province, and the health budget had been increased from Rs 30 billion to Rs 80 billion. He said 30 highly-skilled doctors had returned from Britain and US and were now serving at Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar.

Khan, however, said that health reforms were an uphill task. There are serious obstacles in bringing reforms to public hospitals. Doctors who were dismissed from Lady Reading Hospital received a stay order from the court, and the Young Doctors Association staged a protest over it. He hoped the CJP would also look towards these issues.

Earlier, the PTI chief had presented an 11-point agenda, citing health, education, elimination of corruption, and self-reliance as top priorities for development in the country.

Published in Daily Times, May 8^th 2018.