PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government is set to sign an agreement with the National Database and Registration Authority for coming up with a mechanism to strictly monitor the Sehat Sahulat Programme ahead of its extension to the entire province in coming July.

The officials told Dawn that in the first phase that began in 2015, the social health protection initiative covered 21 per cent of the poor people in four districts, while it was extended to 51 per cent in 25 districts in the second phase in 2016.

They said currently, 69 per cent of the people received free health facilities under the programme.

The officials said a proper mechanism wasn’t there to check the credentials of programme beneficiaries and services at empanelled hospitals and the amount received by the service-providing outlets through the State Life Insurance Corporation, which was implementing the programme on behalf of the government.

They said the programme had sought the Nadra’s support 18 months ago, while heed was paid to it only after the government announced the programme’s extension to all residents of the province as the exercise couldn’t be executed with the obsolete data obtained from the Benazir Income Support Programme.

Govt to extend Sehat Sahulat Programme to all districts in July

The officials said the agreement was likely to be signed between the government and Nadra by the middle of March.

They said 204,000 patients had so far received treatment at the cost of over Rs5 billion under the programme, while the province needed from Rs10 billion to Rs12 billion every year from July 2020 for which the linkage with Nadra was required.

Programme director Dr Mohammad Riaz Tanoli told Dawn that the federal government had accepted the request of the provincial government to link the programme with Nadra to make it transparent and benefit the people.

He said according to the terms of reference, the Nadra would develop, introduce and maintain a dynamic database, data warehousing and database administration services for the health programme to make it more effective.

“There will be continuous review and update of data set with demographic event on its entries like new births, deaths and change in marital status,” he said.

The director said the initiative would also enable the programme to give regular feedback on the trends in service utilisation and its comparison to other Nadra clients, including the federal and provincial programmes, and it would act as the way for learning.

He said there was a lack of system to know problems facing the beneficiaries but the agreement with Nadra would establish the required linkage and a complaint portal to address the grievances of the people regarding the quality of services offered on the Sehat Insaf Cards.

“The mechanism will expedite complaint management and ensure utilisation of cards by the genuine people. The Nadra being a third party will verify claims generated by hospitals,” he said.

Dr Tanoli said the programme’s access to Nadra’s data would provide a regular analysis of different procedures and treatment trends throughout the province.

He said the Nadra would update the family data of the programme beneficiaries that would automatically come on the programme’s database.

Sources said Khyber Pakhtunkhwa pioneered the project and got recognition and that was launched by federal government but it lacked checks on the insurance firm, which received money for facilitating free services at government and private hospitals.

They said the programme was too short of staff to check the facilities selected for treatment.

The sources said the government should recruit more staff, especially technical one, for the province-wide implementation of the programme in the current fiscal.

Published in Dawn, January 26th, 2020