PESHAWAR: The health department has completed assessment of hospitals throughout Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as part of the plan to establish network of laboratories to strengthen disease surveillance and ensure prompt response to prevent epidemics.

In the first phase, the department will put in place the network involving public sector hospitals by the end of the current year after which private laboratories and hospitals will also be included in it in the second phase, according to officials working on the plan.

The province-wide network of laboratories will operate under the guidance of Public Health Reference Laboratory (PHRL), a state-of-the-art facility established by health department at Khyber Medical University in 2017.

Officials said that the employees of PHRL sometimes faced financial issues as the laboratory got grants on quarterly basis from government. Recently, the provincial government has regularised all employees of PHRL to ensure that the facility works on durable basis and there is no break in its operations.

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Officials said that establishment of PHRL was mandatory for very province in the fulfilment of International Health Regulations (IHR) to diagnose all notifiable diseases and prevent epidemics such as cholera, Covid-19, measles, Congo fever, mpox, dengue and CCHF etc. “PHRL will ensure that the new outlets work as per IHR’s guidelines,” they said.

They said that establishment of PHRL was also required under National Action Plan. Health department has recently briefed Chief Secretary Shahab Ali Shah regarding the initiative of setting up network of laboratories as part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Good Governance Plan.

Officials said that integrated disease surveillance lab network would speed up investigations of different diseases, enabling health department to put up prompt response. Software is being developed through which all details regarding services will be available to the department as well PHRL.

They said that the department had already identified 47 laboratories in different hospitals that would be connected through proper networking. PHRL will impart training of HRs to all employees of these laboratories so that they can conduct tests locally. For highly sophisticated investigations in outbreak situations, these laboratories will send samples to PHRK through courier service and the results will be provided rapidly.

“In this connection, two workshops have already taken place where personnel of the designated labs have been trained. Training of staff will be an ongoing process to ensure that all workers get information and new techniques about lab investigations,” said officials.

They said that health department had established 12 PCR laboratories during Covid-19 and their equipment and trained staff would also be made part of the network. Earlier, the department had asked all the hospitals to submit details about the existing situation of human resources, equipment and other stuff as part of assessment of lab facilities.

Officials said that for the first time a province in Pakistan was establishing integrated diseases surveillance response (IDSR) laboratory network. They said that currently, all the districts were sending samples for detection of some diseases to PHRL that consumed time. Once the networking is completed, most tests will be conducted at district level for prompt diagnosis.

They said that boosting up surveillance for timely detection of diseases would help the department to respond quickly and prevent situation from snowballing into major public health crisis.

PHRL, in collaboration with National Institute of Health (NIH), has been performing most of investigations of diseases. Prior to its establishment, the department used to send samples to NIH, which took longer to provide results because the later was processing samples from the entire country.

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2025