ISLAMABAD, July 30: An inter-provincial meeting of health ministers early next month is likely to approve Rs31 billion five-year national maternal and child health programme to bring down high mortality rate among children and mothers.

An official source told Dawn that the meeting would finalize the plan by incorporating recommendations suggested by different provinces. Prompt implementation of the programme is necessitated due to the fact that Pakistan ranked eight in the world for number of child deaths as 565,000 children under the age of five die every year while one mother dies after every 20 minutes, the source said.

Among every 1,000 children, 100 children never live to see their fifth birthday, 80 die in the first year of life, 45 die in the first month of life while 30 are dead within the first week of life. Likewise, 70 per cent of all pregnant women have iron deficiency anaemia and 25 per cent of all births (1.2 million) weigh less than 2.5 kilograms at birth.

The inter-provincial meeting will be attended by all the four provincial health ministers and Health Minister Mohammad Nasir Khan will preside over the meeting. Earlier, the same meeting was scheduled for July 23, but it was postponed because of the inability of the health ministers who are already engaged in the upcoming local government elections in their respective constituencies.

The concept paper of the plan was earlier presented during a seminar, held in April last in which Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz had announced to raise major chunk of the funding required for the project from government’s own kitty but had also expressed the hope that donor agencies would come forward to meet the rest of the needed financing.

In Pakistan, 80 per cent of births took place without any medical care or skilled birth attendants as a result of which mortality rate among children is very high, the source said. According to the plan, the availability of at least two skilled birth attendants in each Basic Health Unit (BHU) of a total of 5,000 would be ensured.