PESHAWAR: Health department has decided to continue with outsourcing of hospitals as the process for contracting out 18 more facilities is in progress under public-private partnership programme in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
After attending a briefing of Health Foundation (HF), the health adviser to the governor, retired Lt Gen Dr Nigar Johar, termed the initiative excellent and appreciated the positive and effective approach for ensuring provision of quality services to people.
“We will continue this process and remain committed to strengthening it further so that people can receive efficient, accessible and step-by-step services at their doorstep,” she said on the occasion, according to officials.
HF has been authorised to go ahead with outsourcing as per plan. The foundation has so far outsourced 36 hospitals in the province and outsourcing of 51 more is in the pipeline.
HF head says outsourced facilities have shown improvement
The managing director of HF, Dr Khizar Hayat, said that private organisations with relevant experience, human resource, financial position and other skills in managing healthcare services would be selected for running affairs of hospitals.
“The government’s oversight has been strengthened for financial and administrative improvement in the outsourced hospitals that include reinforcement of government’s supervision to ensure attendance of staff and availability of services for visitors in OPD, wards, operation theatres and accident and emergency departments of the outsourced hospitals,” he said.
He said that health department was fully empowered to ask partner organisations, running the hospitals, about their performance and improvement in patient care and make sure that instruments and equipment remained operational.
Dr Khizar said that private organisations were responsible to run the outsourced hospitals for which they would get a budget from the government every four months, subject to performance review by health department.
The outsourcing of hospitals has created an outrage and some people have moved court against it, saying public sector hospitals are being given to private sector.
However, Peshawar High Court on May 22 rejected multiple petitions, challenging the government’s decision to outsource 24 public sector hospitals to private companies. The court said that it had limited powers to interfere in the government’s policy matters. The process of outsourcing public sector hospitals resumed after the high court’s verdict.
Dr Khizar said that many outsourced hospitals had shown improvement due to which the policy was approved by the existing setup. He said that employees not performing their duties properly would face deduction from their salary and their contracts would be terminated if they failed to mend their ways.
He said that work was expedited prior to signing contracts with partner organisations for the rest of the hospitals that were already named by health department for outsourcing.
Health officials said that government had approved outsourcing of 72 hospitals to private organisations under public-private partnership programme after a survey was conducted by directorate-general health services. They said that the survey showed that those health facilities didn’t work to a desired level, mostly because of staff’s absenteeism that was triggered by out-of-order instruments and hospitals waited for months for carrying out small repair work due to government’s system but private organisations could take such decisions without pursuing the lengthy process.
A major reason for the ill-performance of the selected hospitals was lack of electricity that made X-rays and other services almost dysfunctional. It will be the responsibility of partner organisations to keep services in outsourced hospitals in progress under the supervision of health department.
Published in Dawn, November 3rd, 2026
