PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has planned to register 350,000 more residents of the province with the Sehat Sahulat Programme for free diagnosis and treatment in its own and private hospitals across the province.

The plan has been made in light of the repatriation of Fata’s displaced families, who registered themselves with the initiative as KP residents.

The programme was launched in January to offer free health facilities to 1.8 million families, whose total daily income was around $1, at the government’s expenses.

The government had issued the Sehat Insaf Cards on the basis of the data provided by the Benazir Income Support Programme to the families.

According to the relevant officials, the Rs5.4 billion programme has so far provided treatment to around 31,600 people throughout the province. However, around 350,000 registered households haven’t benefitted from it.

This has happened because most of such people belong to the Fata, who had registered themselves with the programme as KP residents during stay in the province after displacement from hometowns due to military operations, have returned.

The officials told Dawn that the government had planned to replace displaced families with the local (KP) ones in order to benefit them from the free SSP healthcare.

They said the government had enrolled 30,000 families in Tank district but the verification showed that 50 per cent of the people had returned to native villages in North and South Waziristan agencies.

The officials said they were planning to register KP-based families with daily income of $1.6-$2 to make up for those, who first wrongly registered themselves with the programme but didn’t benefit from free treatment due to repatriation after the law and order situation improved in their hometowns.

They said the government is already facing an embarrassing situation on the failure to meet the programme’s targets as only Rs600 million had so far been spent on free treatment.

The officials said of the 100 health facilities offering free treatment under the programme, 80 are private-owned.

They said only Rs50 million had gone to the government’s hospitals due to the laxity of the officials concerned to start the programme and provide facilities to the people quickly.

The official added that on the contrary, private hospitals provided prompt services due to which patients preferred treatment there.

“In order to cover more families for free treatment, the government is going to issue the Sehat Insaf Cards to more people for which data has been obtained from the BISP,” an official said.

He said the government had been asking its hospitals to launch the programme and earn money from the SSP but the progress shown by the Lady Reading Hospital and Hayatabad Medical Complex only was satisfactory.

Another official said the government wanted to spend the allocated amount within two years but given the speed with which the people were benefiting from the programme, the use of that funding within the given period was not possible.

He said the way forward was to include more households in the programme and spend the amount on their treatment.

The officials said the government would continue pressing its hospitals for speeding up operation to treat more people under the programme.

Published in Dawn, June 18th, 2017