PESHAWAR: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Foundation has streamlined the mechanism of fund flow to private organisations prior to outsourcing 24 hospitals in the province.

“We are currently in the process of outsourcing 24 hospitals through a cluster strategy. Each organisation will have to take two hospitals, one in urban area and one in rural area with a view to ensure provision of treatment services to patients in remote districts too,” the managing director of Health Foundation (HF), Dr Khizar Hayat Khan, told Dawn.

According to him, these measures will lead to improvement of medical services in both rural and urban areas and the hospitals will be run smoothly as private organisations will get funds quickly.

Previously, the approval of issuance of funds to the organisations, running the outsourced hospitals, took at least 120 days but now the whole process would be completed within about 20 days, he said.

Health Foundation chief says nursing colleges will also be run by private organisations

The government has planned to outsource a total of 72 hospitals to private organisations across the province. The government has so far outsourced 19 hospitals to private partners but in some hospitals services have gotten disrupted owing to delay in payment to the organisations that run the health facilities on behalf of government.

HF, a public sector entity, established under Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Foundation Act, 2016, is outsourcing under-performing healthcare facilities to private organisations having the required experience of running hospitals to benefit patients’ care. Under the law, the hospitals are run by private partners that get budget from government but ensure that all posts are filled and people get services.

Dr Khizar said that government was outsourcing hospitals after an assessment, which showed that those health facilities were not operating fully. He said that private partners would ensure presence of doctors, nurses and other staff in the outsourced hospitals in addition to making sure functioning of the required equipment and diagnostic tools.

In big hospitals, like district headquarters hospitals Lakki Marwat and Hangu, the partners will ensure availability of gynae, surgical, medical, mother and child, ENT, eye, orthopaedic and other specialised services along with emergency arrangements, ICU, CCU round-the-clock so that patients in the districts get the required treatment services.

“Previously, private organisations were free to take control of hospitals through proper bidding process and many opted for urban areas. Now we have made it mandatory that each organisation will apply for two hospitals simultaneously, one in rural and another in urban area,” said Dr Khizar.

He said that having learnt from the previous experience, they were introducing reforms to make things easier for partners. “We expect that they will fully implement the agreements to be signed with HF,” he added.

Dr Khizar said that each of the outsourced hospitals would operate under the supervision of government because it would remain s government’s entities. He said that they wanted to ensure availability of all medical services to patients and utilisation of funds for healthcare of people. He added that an oversight committee consisting of cabinet members and high-ranked officials of health department would check the operations of outsourced hospitals.

“Our focus is on improvement of primary healthcare services, infrastructure development and community engagement to ensure equitable and quality healthcare for all citizens. Not only hospitals, we are also working on outsourcing nursing colleges and presently Nursing College Bajaur is being outsourced where learning and training situation will get improved,” he said.

Published in Dawn, September 30th, 2025