By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The last surviving infant from a devastating fire at a government hospital nursery in Islamabad has died, a hospital spokesperson confirmed on Thursday, bringing the final death toll from last month’s blaze to 15.
The baby, who had been placed on a ventilator after being pulled from the burning ward, died late on Wednesday night while still under treatment, weeks after the fire tore through the Mother and Child Health nursery at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) on 26 August.
Dr Aneza Jalil, a spokesperson for the hospital, confirmed the infant’s death. “The only surviving child of PIMS nursery blaze has passed away,” she said.
The fire broke out in a unit built to hold ten medically dependent newborns but which was, at the time, treating fifteen. Fourteen of those babies died in the blaze itself. The fifteenth was rescued by a nurse, Razia Noreen, according to local media reports, and placed on ventilator support, clinging to life for weeks before succumbing on Wednesday.
News of the infant’s death came a day after a long-awaited inquiry report identified the likely cause of the fire: an electrical fault in the supply cable of an air-conditioning unit. Investigators concluded that localised heating had probably damaged the cable’s insulation, igniting nearby combustible material.
But the report went further, describing a pattern of ignored warnings that made the tragedy foreseeable, if not inevitable. It found that PIMS had been repeatedly alerted to broader fire-safety failings across the hospital, including after a separate fire at its nursing hostel on 6 July that exposed serious gaps in smoke detection, alarm systems, electrical inspection regimes, evacuation planning, firefighting equipment and emergency preparedness.
Those warnings, the inquiry panel found, were never translated into a comprehensive, time-bound programme of corrective action, verified by an independent body, before the nursery caught fire seven weeks later.
In the wake of the report’s findings, Islamabad police have opened criminal proceedings against nine hospital officials, Pakistan’s health minister, Syed Mustafa Kamal, told Arab News on Wednesday.
“The investigation team and the committee have really gone through a detailed investigation, and out of all the evidence, they have found guilty definitely. And the criminal proceeding has been started,” Kamal said. “It’s not the matter of, you know, finding the facts anymore.”
The minister said immediate safety measures, including new fire-safety equipment, had already been installed at PIMS since the fire. “Whatever recommendation they had made in preliminary report, we have done 100 percent compliance on that,” he said.
The final report set out 34 separate recommendations aimed at improving patient safety across Pakistan’s public hospitals, Kamal said, some requiring immediate action and others amounting to longer-term structural reform. “There are some actions needed to be taken immediately and some are, you know, a bit long-term, you know, reforms and structural changes and all. So, we are working on every recommendation,” he said.
The deaths of the newborns, most of whom were being treated for conditions requiring intensive neonatal care, drew widespread condemnation in Pakistan and renewed scrutiny of safety standards at the country’s public hospitals, many of which operate well beyond their designed capacity.
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