ISLAMABAD: Majority of people unsatisfied: NRB : Govt health services
By Our Reporter
ISLAMABAD, Nov 1: Only 23 per cent of households across the country are satisfied with the government health services, National Reconstruction Bureau’s (NRB) survey on “Social Audit of Governance and Delivery of Public Services” showed.
The survey, which has only recently been conducted by the NRB and Community Information Empowerment & Training (CIET), an international NGO with the financial assistance of Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), paints a dismal state of affairs of the public sector health services.
As many as 45 per cent households were dissatisfied with the available services, while 32 per cent said they had no access to the government’s public health services at all.
The survey maintained that the general household satisfaction with the government health services was fairly similar across the country - Sindh, 22 per cent; Balochistan 17 per cent; NWFP 27 percent; Punjab 23 per cent; and Islamabad 31 per cent. The survey also noted that this satisfaction rating came from all households, whether or not they used government health services.
Similarly, statistics collected during the survey also underlined that households in urban sites were more satisfied with the government health services as compared with the households in rural sites.
Likewise, when household respondents were asked where people in the household usually went for medical attention, nationally, nearly a third of households - 31 per cent - reported they quite often used the government health services. While nearly half - 47 per cent - said they used private medical facilities and 21 per cent used private unqualified practitioners.
The utilisation pattern also varied from one province to another. In NWFP, a relatively high proportion of households reported using government health facilities - 59 per cent. In Sindh, more than two-thirds of households reported using private qualified practitioners and in Punjab, more than a third of households - 34 per cent - reported they usually used non- qualified private practitioners for medical attention.
It also underlined that four of ten households - 42 per cent - reported they incurred some travel cost to reach the health service or practitioners they usually used for medical attention, while over half of households - 55 per cent - reported they walked to their health service or practitioner, and about a third - 37 per cent - used public transport and eight per cent hired transport.
The survey also maintained that urban households didn’t prefer to use government health facilities compared with the rural households. During the survey, virtually all the focus groups mentioned that the government health services needed more and better qualified staff.
Another commonly voiced requirement was for more medicines so that the need to buy the required medicine outside the health facility would be reduced.
