Imran Khan’s party improves services in Pakistan’s wildest province

“THEY are getting away with murder,” says Khalid Masud, director of the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, the largest in a province long racked by insurgency. Dr Khalid was not talking of the Pakistani Taliban or other extremist groups, but of his own doctors. Of the 45 senior consultants at the hospital, many pop in for no more than an hour a day if at all. Then they leave for their private clinics, taking with them those patients who can afford to pay. Patients without money can die before they see a specialist at the 1,750-bed facility. Such is the state of public health care for the 27m residents of Pakistan’s mountainous, troubled border region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Things may be changing, though. A recent law seeks to pin wayward doctors to their official place of work. Only a handful have reappeared at the notorious Lady Reading. But about 60 are back at work at another Peshawar hospital nearby.

That reform is possible in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is down to...