Chief Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Ali Amin Khan Gandapur, has termed health sector as one of his government’s key priorities sectors, and said that efforts to strengthen healthcare facilities at grassroot level are underway by ensuring the efficient and effective use of avaible medical equipments and human resources in these hospitals with the aim to ensure basic healthcare facilities to the people at local level and thereby reducing the patients load on teaching hospitals. He stated that efforts are underway to improve the standards of public sector hospitals so that maximum public sector hospitals could be empanneld in Sehat Card program to make free healthcare services accessible to people everywhere in the province. Mr. Gandapur remaked that steps have been taken to address gaps and loopholes in Sihat Card scheme, prevent its misuse, and enhance its efficiency adding that these efforts have resulted in significant improvement in free treatment facilities under the scheme.
The Chief Minister shared these views while talking to a delegation of Insaf Doctors Forum who called on him at his office here the other day, and discussed with him matters related to the ongoing reforms in the health sector, improvements in service delivery in public sector hospitals, and ways to address issues facing the doctor community. The Chief Minister said that the provincial government was planning to include life insurance scheme in Sehat Card program which, he termed, as a unique program of social protection. Ali Amin Gandapur stated that his government is also planning to establish its own life ensurance company to run all its social protection schemes on sustainable grounds adding that for the first time, bone marrow and liver transplant projects are also being launched in the province.
He said that the provincial government would welcome inputs from the medical community for improvement and reforms in health sectors, and asked the doctors to sit with the concerned quarters of health department, and bring forward doable proposals for integrating emergency and ICU services in all public sector hospitals of the province, and for improving the overall patients care systems in these hospitals for the benifit of patients at large.
