KARACHI: The Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre’s third hospital, rising in DHA City Karachi, will open its doors on 29 December 2026, Insha’Allah. The announcement was made by Dr Aasim Yusuf, Chief Medical Officer of Shaukat Khanum Hospitals, during a media briefing held at the Karachi hospital site.
The Karachi hospital is a Rs 30 billion project that, at full capacity, will be twice the size of the network’s Lahore facility — making it the largest hospital in the Shaukat Khanum network. It will serve cancer patients from Karachi, across Sindh, and southern Balochistan, bringing the institution’s treatment model to a region that reports some of the highest cancer numbers in the country.
The announcement
Addressing journalists at the Karachi site, Dr Yusuf said finishing works on the hospital were continuing at pace. Key medical equipment — including linear accelerators, a cyclotron, air-conditioning and ventilation systems, and power generators — has arrived and is being installed, while staff recruitment is under way.
The Karachi facility is the third tertiary-care cancer hospital built by the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Trust. The first hospital opened in Lahore in 1994, and the second in Peshawar has now completed ten years of service. The network also operates four walk-in clinics, three diagnostic centres, and more than 190 laboratory collection centres across Pakistan.
Pakistan’s largest cancer hospital
At full capacity, the Karachi hospital will be the biggest facility in the network — double the size of the Lahore hospital that started it all. Its scale reflects the size of the need: more than 13,000 new cancer patients are reported each year across Karachi’s hospitals, where treatment is often fragmented or prohibitively costly for ordinary families.
Like the Lahore and Peshawar hospitals, the Karachi facility will operate on the Trust’s founding model, under which more than 75% of patients receive their cancer treatment free of charge. Since 1994, the network has spent Rs 137 billion on free cancer care, and its budget for 2026 stands at Rs 43.2 billion — funded by donations, zakat, and fundraising from Pakistanis at home and abroad.
The cancer burden it answers
Karachi’s cancer burden makes the new hospital a significant addition to the city’s healthcare landscape. With thousands of new cases surfacing every year and many patients forced to travel to Lahore or Peshawar for affordable treatment, a full-scale cancer hospital in Karachi itself is expected to cut that burden dramatically.
The Shaukat Khanum hospitals are accredited by the Joint Commission International and the College of American Pathologists — international benchmarks the Karachi hospital is being built to meet. Equipment such as linear accelerators and a cyclotron places it in the top tier of radiation oncology facilities in the region.
As the finishing touches go up at the DHA City site, the Trust’s message to donors and patients alike is the one that has carried the institution for three decades: the work continues — and on 29 December 2026, God willing, it opens a new chapter in Karachi.
