LAHORE, Sept 27: The Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf’s “Health Vision” aims at shifting focus from tertiary care to secondary and primary healthcare to offer quality healthcare services to rural population at its door step.

It also plans to focus more on preventive medicine than curative care.

Explaining PTI’s Health Vision at party’s media cell office on Thursday, party’s Punjab Secretary-General Dr Yasmin Rashid said almost all health indicators related to women and child health showed shameful figures putting Pakistan at the bottom of various countries’ list.

Dr Rashid, flanked by party’s Information Secretary Shafqat Mahmood, said the successive governments had ruined the healthcare system in the country. She said the healthcare facilities had been concentrated in urban areas.

Dr Rashid, who is part of PTI’s Health Advisory Team, said all health indicators including maternal and child health, communicable and non-communicable diseases were shocking. There were appalling gender, income and rural-urban inequities besides shocking mother and infant mortality rates. The food security and stunting rates among children were also shockingly high.

Besides burden of polio, hepatitis and tuberculosis, she said, water-borne diseases alone were consuming 250,000 children’s lives every year. Despite abysmally low health allocations, she said, as many as 624 RHCs and 5,000 BHUs in the country were consuming billions of rupees without any impact on the health of rural poor.

Knowing the ground realities, she said, the PTI had the political will to change the status quo and ability to transform the healthcare delivery system.

Dr Rashid committed that the PTI, when in power, would bring about cent per cent improvement in the existing (24 per cent) coverage by the public sector through increased public health funding from 0.8 per cent to 2.6 per cent of GDP. The PTI would bring in comprehensive preventive healthcare programmes with special emphasis on blindness, genetic disorders, mental illnesses and oral diseases. “This will help in reducing the burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases,” she added.

She said the primary healthcare would be priortised and linked to tertiary care hospitals with proper referral system. The party would introduce complete decentralisation and de-politicisation of health governance by a fully devolved national health governance system with solid links to the community. She said a well-trained health workforce would be produced to meet country’s needs. A reliable health information system would also be developed for evidence-based planning and decision making.

She committed that availability of safe drinking water and sanitation facilities for rural and urban population would be ensured across the country. Regulatory and statutory bodies would be strengthened to ensure provision of quality services and medical education.

“The PTI government, in its five-year tenure, will dramatically change the health profile of the people of Pakistan,” she asserted.