PESHAWAR: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa health department is awaiting go-ahead signal from German government to start free treatment programme for outpatients in four districts of the province, according to official sources.

Germany has already pledged 7 million Euros to launch free OPD services in the designated districts including Mardan, Malakand, Kohat and Chitral. The programme will be implemented by the Social Health Protection Initiative (SHPI) of the health department under which 100,000 families or around 5, 50,000 persons will receive OPD treatment free of cost.

Dr Mohammad Riaz Tanoli, the chief executive officer of SHPI, told Dawn that the programme would be enforced in the designated districts. He said that the programme would be started from Mardan where 40,000 patients would be able to get OPD services under it.

According to him, another district will be included in the scheme after six months where the beneficiaries will get three free checkups per year and the cost of consultation fee, investigations and medicines will be paid from the grant provided by the government of Germany through KfW Bank. “We are in the process of selection of partner but approval has yet to come from the donor country,” he added.

The programme will be launched in Mardan, Malakand, Kohat and Chitral districts

Dr Riaz said that the recipients of free OPD services would be selected on the basis of Benazir Income Support Programme. He said that only the people listed as the poorest would stand eligible to get free health services at OPD.

“The programme will be started at the union council level where two general practitioners will be contracted to deal with patients. One each doctor will be selected from public and private sector,” he said.

Dr Riaz said that a similar programme was started by the provincial government in collaboration with Germany in those districts in 2015 under which three per cent population was provided with free treatment.

He said that the same initiative proved very successful in provision of free health services to patients. He said that on basis o that initiative, the provincial government launched its own Sehat Sahulat Programme (SSP) and started provision of free health services to 51 per cent residents of the province in August 2016. The scheme was later extended to the entire population of the province, he added.

The SSP, later named as Sehat Card Plus, has been covering only hospitalised patients and has so far provided free health services to 2.55 million patients at a cost of Rs63 billion.

The number of beneficiaries of the programme has increased manifolds after its extension to the whole population of the province.

In the financial year, 2022-2023, more than 1.3 million patients underwent free of cost treatment at the designated public and private hospitals in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and other provinces and Islamabad.

Officials in health department said that the finance department had allocated Rs7 billion for the programme but the amount hadn’t been released to State Life Insurance Corporation (SLIC), the implementing agency of the scheme. They said that the government had to pay a total of Rs12 billion outstanding dues to SLIC.

They said that health department was trying to persuade the finance department to release the full amount to the insurer in one go so that the free cancer treatment, dialysis, intensive care and liver and kidney transplants could be resumed under the programme.

On April 29, the SLIC stopped these services, citing lack of reserved fund that led to deprivation of 15,000 patients, including 13,000 needing dialysis and 2,000 suffering from cancer, of the cashless health services in addition to halting transplants.

“If the government releases the whole amount, these services will resume,” they said.

Published in Dawn, July 24th, 2023