PESHAWAR: Afghan nationals continue to avail free treatment at the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre (SKMCH&RC), Peshawar due to non-availability of such facilities in their homeland.
“The number of new registrations of Afghan nationals at SKMCH&RC has risen since 2012, when we recorded 215 cases, to 426 in 2021, with a peak of 746 cases in 2016 of the approximately 12,000 patients we treat annually,” Dr Faisal Sultan, the chief executive of SKMCH told Dawn.
Most of the patients visit SKMCH, inaugurated by Imran Khan in December 2015 over 50 kanals of land donated by the then provincial government of Awami National Party. Afghans continue to visit Peshawar due to lack of specialised health services in their native country.
Dr Faisal is a former federal health minister. He has also co-authored a study “Cancer care in times of conflict: cross border care in Pakistan of patients from Afghanistan” in March 2020. He said that the flow of people with cancer from Afghanistan seeking care in Pakistan continued through the years, regardless of the situation of refugees.
Dr Faisal Sultan says international policies needed to provide healthcare to people in conflict areas
In the study, he looked at the typology of cancer patients seeking care in Pakistan over a 22-year period from 1995 to 2017. He said that 60 per cent of the patients were men, over a third had upper gastrointestinal cancer and more than half were diagnosed at an advanced stage.
“The real issue is that Afghanistan has weak facilities for cancer treatment and care as decades of conflict have devastated the country’s health infrastructure. This situation impacts the ability of Afghan refugees, migrants and cross-border patients to access to care and complete treatment. We have treated nearly 3,500 Afghan patients from 1995 to 2017,” said Dr Faisal.
The number of patients is most likely to be much higher as the staffers at the hospital don’t ask for national identity papers. They register only those patients, who have an address in Afghanistan, as Afghan refugees.
In the study, Dr Faisal stressed the need for devising new national and international policies and adopting practices to provide relevant models of care in situation of conflict and in the neighbouring regions that welcomed refugees.
He said that those polices should account for complex migration patterns and respond to the particular physical and mental needs of population from diverse socioeconomic and political environments.
Pakistan has a mixed health system with services, including cancer care, are provided by public sector hospitals, private institutions and the non-profit sector. About 200,000 cases of cancer are recorded every year in Pakistan. “An estimated 50,000 patients contact SKMCH for care but we can only treat about 12,000 patients annually,” said Dr Faisal.
He said that 22 per cent of patients paid fully from their own pockets and most were treated freely through the donations fund raised by SKMCH. “These patients also include people with cancer from Afghanistan, seeking care in Pakistan. They also benefit from free care if they are unable to pay,” he added.
Dr Faisal said that the centre was visited by people from the entire social spectrum and the staff did not know a person’s particular life situation. UNCHR has been assisting SKMCH, Peshawar as part of its Refugee Affected and Hosting Areas (RAHA) programme.
“We have provided high-tech medical equipment to SKMCH Peshawar,” said Qaisar Khan Afridi, the spokesman for UN refugees agency.
He said that RAHA was meant to mitigate the impact of the protracted refugee presence and promote social cohesion between Afghan refugees and their Pakistani host communities.
Since its launch in 2009, the programme has benefited more than 12 million people across the country through some 4,300 projects worth more than $ 200 million. About 85 per cent of the beneficiaries of the programme are Pakistanis.
Published in Dawn, August 3rd, 2022