PESHAWAR: Health department has started process to empanel more hospitals for free medical treatment of people on Sehat Card Plus as number of patients continues to swell in the province.

“We have sought applications from new hospitals aspiring to be empanelled as we need more health facilities to ensure free treatment of patients. So far, 85 hospitals have applied and more requests will be received till July 15,” said Dr Aamir Rafiq Khattak, the empanelment director of Sehat Card Plus.

According to him, after completion the process, the applicants will be reviewed and the shortlisted ones will be assessed through field visits prior to their selection. In some districts like Karak, Lakki Marwat, Hangu, Chitral, Tank and Torghar where better hospitals were non-existent, the selection criteria was softened to ensure that people got free health services in their own districts, he added.

“For instance, we have set a score of 70 per cent for Peshawar and other central districts where a hospital having at least 100 beds will be picked up for the programme. In remote districts, hospitals with 40 beds will be required to score 50 per cent. The score is decided by a panel of our experts after visiting hospitals and inspecting their infrastructure including wards, operation theatres, blood banks and pharmacy stores along with doctors, nurses and other staff,” he said.

Official says 85 health facilities have submitted applications so far

Dr Aamir said that hospitals required general surgery, medicines, peads and gynaecology wards to be empanelled for the free treatment programme. “We are also seeking advice of the policy board for empanelment of hospitals with super specialties for facilitating people to get highly specialised services,” he added.

Presently, there are 119 hospitals in the province where people with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s national identity cards can seek free healthcare services but after resumption of full scale services on March 12, the flow of patients is rising and the government needs more hospitals to cater to load of patients.

Dr Aamir said that assessment of the already empanelled hospitals was also planned and those not fulfilling the criteria would be deleted from the list. “As per protocol, the government wants to provide quality services to people in the designated hospitals that will be assessed again,” he added.

The whole process will be completed by late August because it is a hard exercise to find new outlets with standard infrastructure and de-list the ones that are not following the SCP’s criteria.

Dr Aamir said that empanelment of new hospitals and de-listing of the old ones on basis of poor performance was an ongoing exercise to make sure that the money spent by the government benefited patients. He said that dozens of hospitals were deleted from the panel since the programme began. “There is also a complaint management mechanism under which patients can register their issues on which actions are taken as per rules,” he said.

He said that the programme of free healthcare services witnessed a great improvement with passing of time.

Meanwhile, record shows that a total of 3.086 million patients have received free health services under the programme since November 2020 when the initiative was to the entire population of the province. A total of Rs78 billion has been spent so far on the free treatment programme.

The government has sanctioned Rs37 billion for the programme in the current fiscal year as compared to Rs28 billion of the last financial year.

Published in Dawn, July 9th, 2024