During his visit to Karachi for the inauguration of the Aga Khan School of Nursing, Hazar Imam was awarded honorary membership in the Pakistan Medical Association. "For the first time in the 33 years History of the Pakistan Medical Association," said Dr. Jamshed H. Wania, the President of the Association, in his welcome address, "it has been our great fortune to bestow upon a personality like yours the Honorary Membership of the Pakistan Medical Association, Sind and we hope that your Highness will be gracious enough to accept his Honorary Membership as a token of our appreciation for your generosity and foresight in establishing the first ever private Medical College with its ancillary units in Karachi."
Hazar Imam accepted this honor and expressed his deep gratitude. During his speech, he spoke of his many visits to medical institutions in different parts of the world, commenting that he had been struck "most forcefully, especially in recent years, by the degree of self-questioning found in the world of medicine today - at least as much in the industrialized nations of the north as among the developing countries of the south."
After briefly examining some of these problems - the rising cost of medicine, the management of health services, the relevance of the curricula at medical schools, he went on to say "...we must determine for ourselves, in our own special circumstances, how our doctors should be trained, how they should be utilized and motivated once they qualify, how they can be provided a structured career development which extracts the maximum national value from a scarce and precious human resource: that is the crux of the problem as I see it."
Source: The American Ismaili, July, 1981
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