PESHAWAR, Nov 8: The NWFP Health Department is organising a donors’ conference in Abbottabad on Wednesday to coordinate relief activities in health sector and avoid duplication of work by the agencies in the quake-hit areas, officials told Dawn.

About 80 per cent of health facilities have been destroyed in the quake-hit areas, these included BHUs and dispensaries. Tehsil Headquarters Hospital, Balakot and District Headquarters Hospital, Mansehra have also been badly damaged by the quake, an official said.

Health Minister Inayatullah Khan said that they needed about Rs5 billion for the rehabilitation of the damaged facilities.

We need assistance for immediate rehabilitation of health facilities. We have already conveyed our priorities to the donor organisations, he said.

The minister said that several international donor agencies had pledged to work for the rehabilitation of the health facilities in Balakot, but the provincial government wants the donor agencies to assist it in all the affected areas.

“Not only in Balakot, but the healthcare outlets in Mansehra, Battagram and other affected areas also needed to be rehabilitated to make them usable for the patients”, Mr Khan said.

A health department official said that injured people were being directly shifted to Peshawar hospitals due to non- availability of medical facilities there. He said they needed both medium and long-term donors’ assistance for the rehabilitation of the destroyed facilities.

“We still want more specialists, pathologists, psychiatrists to provide specialist treatment to the people,” he added.

He said that a 1,000-bed makeshift hospital had been established in Mansehra, while the district headquarters hospitals in Abbottabad and Mansehra had been upgraded to cope with a number of casualties, but the government wants donors’ cooperation and coordination.

The donors’ conference would take stock of the situation and recommends measures to avoid duplication of activities.

He said that they needed more resources to reach inaccessible areas and retrieve the bodies beneath the debris, provide treatment to the injured and bury the dead.

He said that relief activities were being concentrated in Mansehra, Abbottabad and other accessible areas, while the affected population in inaccessible areas awaited assistance.

He said that in Balakot efforts were being made to establish tented hospitals to provide first aid to the injured people before shifting them to big hospitals.

A doctor of the health department, who arrived here from Balakot after participating in relief activities there for several days, said that coordination among the relief teams and workers could make a difference because the present pace of relief activities was extremely slow and was unlikely to yield the desired result.