PESHAWAR: The health department is unlikely to merge ‘free cancer treatment project’ with Sehat Card Plus programme after lack of interest by the pharmaceutical firm supporting the scheme.

“Novartis Pharmaceuticals has been extending financial support to the health department for providing free medicines to cancer patients at Hayatabad Medical Complex (HMC),” officials said.

They said that tree treatment programme was stopped in June of the current year after expiry of the three-year Memorandum of Understanding with Novartis Pharmaceuticals due to which about 4,000 registered patients faced problems in continuation of their treatment.

“The government wants to include free cancer treatment in the Sehat Card Plus (SCP) programme and extend it to other hospitals to benefit patients. The project is limited to patients visiting HMC,” said officials.

Pharmaceutical firm wants to renew project with same terms, conditions

According to them, the programme is yet to be made part of SCP because Novartis, which is bearing 90 per cent cost of the treatment, is unlikely to enter into partnership with government for provision of free medicines to patient under its flagship health insurance initiative. Novartis is supporting the initiative under its corporate social responsibility programme.

“Therefore, it has been decided to renew the MoU and continue the programme under the same arrangements at HMC,” said officials.

They said that under the new MoU, to be signed within two weeks, Rs3.1 billion would be spent on free treatment of cancer patients. As per the contract, the pharmaceutical firm will pay 92 per cent and health department eight per cent cost of the medicines.

Officials said that it had been decided to extend the programme to other hospitals after its inclusion in SCP. Initially, it has been planned to start it at Khyber Teaching Hospital Peshawar and Ayub Teaching Hospital Abbottabad where patients would receive free clinical services as well as treatment. “Later, the scheme will be started in Swat and Dera Ismail Khan when the services of oncologists are made available there,” they said.

On SCP, free treatment facilities are available at a few hospitals only for admitted patients.

The project titled ‘free treatment of cancer patients’ was launched at oncology department of HMC for blood cancer patients in 2011 where they received free drugs every month. In 2016, the programme was extended to cover all kinds of cancers. As per data, it has so far benefited 9,000 patients, including 3,800 suffering from blood cancer, at a cost of Rs35 billion.

Officials said that 65 per cent of the patients had either recovered or received medicines to ‘stay alive with improved lifestyle’. Cancer patients require two types of treatment. One of the treatments is consisted of radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery, which requires admission of patients. The other is oral treatment, which doesn’t require hospitalisation. Both the treatments are very expensive.

They said that the health department wanted to merge the project with SCP and extend it to other regions to save patients from visiting Peshawar for getting medicines but the company wanted to renew the project with same terms and conditions.

“However, our talks with the pharmaceutical firm are in progress and we can pursue it to merge the project with SCP to enable patients to get access to free treatment in more hospitals. Under SCP, only admitted patients can get free services while the project benefits OPD patients as well,” said officials.

So far, 37,384 in-patients have received free treatment on SCP, costing Rs1.11 billion.

Published in Dawn, December 19th, 2022