Woes of National Health Policy of Pakistan

Pakistan has a centralized healthcare system and the country formulates its health policy at federal level. From federal level, the health policy of Pakistan passes on to the authorities at provincial level and eventually to the district level. But, unfortunately provincial and district level’s feedback is neglected (who have more insight about the people in their area) and hence, all decisions are made at federal level.

The main focus of health policy of Pakistan is empowering the primary healthcare system that includes dispensaries, mother care health units and health units. Hospitals at the district level and institutes for training medical professionals come at the secondary level when it comes to paying attention to the reforms. Despite all the corrective measures, the flaws in the healthcare policy of the country still exist.

With this fiasco, Pakistan’s health indicators have terribly gone down. A total of 2.6% of the whole gross domestic product is spent on the healthcare, which is the least a country could spend. This ranks Pakistan the lowest among South Asian countries.  There exist a total of 175223 doctors and 118041 hospital beds in the country, which makes 1073 patients per doctor and 1593 patients per hospital bed as per calculations.

This explains why the health end medical services of our country are in shambles.  The major factors encouraging these problems are found to be undermining district level authorities in policy making, managerial flaws in implementation of policy and poor resource handling. This could be changed if the system is decentralized i.e. community organizations, NGOs, people from civil society must be involved in formulating healthcare policies. The role of bureaucracy or other influential groups must be minimized in order to make sure accountability. The focus should be on reforming primary healthcare institutes and prevention of diseases.

For this, privately working organizations and the communities have to be actively involved in fixing the system to overcome the woes of health policy of Pakistan. Transparent Hands, being socially sensitive, has taken an integral step to concurrently address the issues emerging in the sector. The effort to address the problem is being made by providing a quality level treatment to those poor patients of the country who are unable to afford their surgeries. Transparent Hands highly transparent web portal is being used for connecting the poor patients with donors all across the globe. The web portal provides one to one connection between the patient and donor, visibility and easy donation flow to ensure the accountability. The organization firmly believes that until and unless there is focus on human welfare, there is no significant contribution to the country’s economic growth.