PESHAWAR: Most of the government healthcare facilities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are inaccessibly located putting a large chunk of population, especially women and children, in a very vulnerable situation.

They were set up on political grounds, the relevant officials of the provincial health department told Dawn.

According to the official statistics, the province has 1,616 health facilities, including eight teaching hospitals, 21 district headquarters hospitals, 19 tehsil hospitals, 125 civil hospitals, 86 rural health centre, 784 basic health units, 421 dispensaries, 66 mother and child health centres, 26 sub-health centres, and 60 leprosy and TB treatment centres.

They are staffed by around 30,200 people, including 5,119 doctors, 3,066 nurses, 13,007 lady health workers and over 4,000 dispensers and technicians.

Only 25pc of the needy benefit from such facilities

However, only 25 per cent of the potential visitors, according to the officials, benefit from these unapproachable facilities.

The officials said most of those facilities had been established on political grounds ignoring ground realities.

Among them is the District Headquarters Hospital, Nowshera, began operations in 2006 though there already exists a similar hospital in the district.

The officials said technically, the government should have analysed the existing health services and the people visiting them before approving the said hospital.

They said with the change of the government, work on the hospital became low priority and even despite the passage of nine years, the hospital had yet to begin operations.

Similarly, the Bannu Medical College and Khalifa Gul Nawaz Hospital were established in haste. Even despite six years of operations, the facilities have failed to attract doctors and other staff.

There are only four women doctors in Bannu.

Recently, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa wanted to recruit women doctors in the district for displaced people from Fata at high pay but roped in no one.

The officials said students of the Bannu Medical College weren’t willing to pursue one-year mandatory paid house job at the hospital and that they preferred to do the same in Peshawar hospitals even at half the amount of the stipend.

They said noted and experienced teachers of medicine and surgery, too, hesitated to take up key posts there to the misery of students.

The officials said around 300,000 operations were carried out at government facilities in the province every year and five million people visited outpatient departments of the government health centres, the numbers which were far below the expected one.They said most of infrastructure and human resources at unapproachable facilities remained unutilised.

The officials said healthcare was a technical subject but it had become a routine practice that elected members recommend schemes for their respective constituencies in the annual development programmes.

According to them, lawmakers select land for health projects on political basis, where they recruit class III and IV employees ignoring catchments area.

The officials said poor planning for the establishment of healthcare facilities caused waste of funds.

According to them, the successive governments began new projects instead of completing the ongoing ones and thus, adversely affecting patient care.

They said the Maulvi Jee Hospital, Hashtnagri had begun operations during the last government though the Lady Reading Hospital was just five minutes drive.

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2014