IN a country where the healthcare system is in a shambles and vast swathes of the population cannot access even existing facilities because they are too far away, lady health workers and community midwives play a vital, life-saving role. While their qualifications fall short of medical degrees, this army of health workers — 26,000 in Sindh — is nevertheless adept at addressing the needs of the people they tend to, and it is all the more admirable that they do it for a pitifully small remuneration, and sometimes in a dangerous atmosphere as in the case of polio vaccinators.

Considering the nature of their job and the low pay, the long-standing demand by the LHWs and CMWs of Sindh for the regularisation of their services is more than justified. It is therefore worthy of appreciation that on Friday, the Sindh health secretary, Iqbal Hussain Durrani, reiterated the provincial government’s commitments to LHWs and CMWs, and said that the services of some 22,500 such health workers and their supervisors would be regularised by the end of the month.

He was speaking at a programme to present awards to workers who had performed outstandingly in their areas. The programme had been organised by Save the Children in collaboration with the Sindh Health Department’s LHW programme, and its maternal, neonatal and children health programme.

It is hoped that the government does indeed make good on this promise. The fact is that even with this army at work, Sindh is nowhere near being able to meet the basic medical needs of all its population. As conceded by Mr Durrani, the present LHW-CMW workforce manages to cover merely 50pc of the population. According to the provincial health secretary, the government has a plan for this and intends to increase the coverage to 70pc by increasing the numbers of LHWs and CMWs substantially.

For this, he added, compromises would have to be made on the qualifications, etc, of those working in remote parts. It is necessary here to sound a note of caution: compromises may be a necessity, but standards must not be allowed to slip. The underprivileged of Sindh should not be forced to put their trust in health workers who do not know their jobs.