PESHAWAR: The health department has decided to empanel hospitals for treatment of patients under Sehat Sahulat Programme from the outlets registered by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Healthcare Commission to provide better services to the beneficiaries, according to sources.

They said that it was hard for SSP to find good hospitals at district level, especially in Karak, Kohistan, Upper Dir and Tank, from where patients visited the adjacent districts for free treatment under the flagship programme launched in January 2017.

Sources said that chief minister announced extension of the programme to the entire population of the province from the next fiscal. “However, it is unlikely to benefit people as there is shortage of hospitals at the district level to receive patients,” they added.

Sehat Sahulat Programme fails to find ‘good’ outlets at district level for free treatment

It is up to the government to strengthen facilities at the district level to be able to receive patients. The situation with regard to infrastructure of healthcare outlets, both in public and private sector, is not up to the mark due to which no hospital exists in four districts.

At the start of the programme, the health department selected about 110 hospitals in the province but later cancelled the contract with about 20 hospitals for not meeting the SSP’s criteria. The cancellation of the award affected the patients. To provide uninterrupted services to the patients, the steering committee of SSP has decided to obtain data of registered hospitals from HCC.

“We have given information to health department about registered outlets, their bed strength, capacity of staff, doctors, nurses, paramedics, presence of OT, blood bank and ICU etc,” Abdul Nasir, the additional director monitoring of HCC, told Dawn.

He said that SSP had its own criteria for selection of hospitals with at least medical and surgical facilities. He added that HCC’s enlisted hospitals would be visited by the SSP before making a decision.

Sources said that the only 1.6 per cent of the total 2.4million targeted families utilised the Sehat Insaf Cards and authorities planned to benefit two per cent during the next two years. During the past two years, about 150,000 people availed free treatment under SSP, mostly in Peshawar-based hospitals.

Lack of facilities at district level is an issue related to the government, which despite increase in salary packages of doctors and presence of infrastructure, is yet to develop the hospitals to meet the criteria for the SSP patients.

The government’s priority to award contracts for the services to public sector hospitals has not been materialised because of lack of the desired infrastructure.

Sources said that in many districts, government’s role was essential to upgrade services. During the past two years, some of the hospitals have improved facilities using the money they earned from SSP patients.

The State Life Insurance Corporation, which is implementing the SSP on behalf of the government, has deployed people at facilitation centres at hospitals and the latter banked on the former to run the health protection plan in the province. SSP is unable to coordinate the programme at district regional level due to shortage of staff as it has only few technical people with 15 support staff.

“SSP is required to have one hospital for 20,000 people at the local level which is difficult to find,” sources said. The programme has also suffered due to stoppage of services at private hospitals, which received half of the total SSP’s patients.

Published in Dawn, April 10th, 2019