This is apropos a Business Recorder op-ed "A burning issue" penned by Ikram Sehgal. The writer has raised some highly valuable points with regard to absence or grave lack of appropriately equipped burns units in our hospitals. He has offered a highly informed perspective on the issue.

He has, for example, pointed out: "Almost all the teaching hospitals of the country, in Multan, Lahore, Faisalabad, Bahawalpur, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Karachi have burns wards which are inadequate, providing only the basic treatments with a very high mortality rate. Despite years of funding by Baitul-Mal the enormous building housing the Burns Centre at Jinnah Hospital, Lahore cannot cope with major burns without the necessary facilities. Was it premonition on Shahbaz Sharif's part that he sent a very frustrated Principal (now retired) Mehmood Shaukat of Allama Iqbal Medical College, Jinnah Hospital Lahore, to the PIMS Burns Centre to devise improving of the facilities in Lahore?"

The Punjab government is therefore required to offer plausible answers to the questions raised by the author. Lack of properly-equipped burn units presents a sardonic comment on our rulers' approach to healthcare.