Tertiary care in K-P: HCC to keep watch on service delivery

PESHAWAR: The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Healthcare Commission (HCC) has devised a fresh strategy to monitor, enforce and regulate minimum service delivery at tertiary care hospitals in the provincial capital.

With the help of new benchmarks, the HCC will ascertain the performance of tertiary care health facilities, including the Lady Reading Hospital, Khyber Teaching Hospital and Hayatabad Medical Complex initially. It will start monitoring of hospitals in other parts of the province in the next phase.

The PTI government has formed the commission through an act of the provincial assembly – the Healthcare Commission (HCC) Act. The commission was supposed to check both the public and private sector health facilities and develop a directory that would carry the names of diagnostic centres and hospitals which were qualified to perform certain treatments and investigations.

Commission officials, during an interaction with the media, said the HCC’s job was to facilitate the general public as well as identify and investigate patients’ and general public’s complaints through a set mechanism – and not to police healthcare facilities.

They said the objective of the commission was to ensure that the best possible health services were provided to patients in the government-run as well as private healthcare facilities and added the commission was also to ensure the provision of all basic facilities at health units.

“The most important objective of the commission is to identify quackeries and fake general practitioners (GPs) and to close their setups so that the lives of innocent people can be saved,” Dr Mohammad Zafar, chairman HCC’s board of governors, said, adding, “People seemed to be unaware of the commission’s existence.”

Published in The Express Tribune, November 19^th, 2016.