World Health Day: Pursuit of a necessity remains a dream

Experts blame low budget, lack of implementation for poor health system.

ISLAMABAD:

For many, pursuit of a healthy lifestyle is but a dream. While people abroad are trying find solutions to antimicrobial resistance (antibiotic-resistance strains of bacteria), people in Pakistan do not even have access to basic healthcare.

An unfortunate family

Muhammad Zaheer and his wife, both patients of complicated diseases, have been through a lot.

Zaheer, 55, a resident of Rawalpindi, works in the Railways Carriage Factory and is a patient of throat cancer. His wife on the other hand, is suffering from a kidney disease. To make matters worse his seven-year-old son, Sameer, and five-year-old daughter, Sania, were wrongly diagnosed by doctors when they fell ill.

Zaheer told The Express Tribune that his son got a lump on his neck, which burst and got infected.

“I took him to Railway Hospital where doctors [wrongly] diagnosed and treated him for tuberculosis (TB).  His condition kept on getting worse,” he said. Only later, when he got his son examined from another hospital, did he found out that his son did not have TB.

When his daughter fell ill, he took her to the same hospital, only to have the doctors there run a few tests, all the while her conditioned kept on deteriorating. She ended up paralysed and became mentally unwell.

The hapless father said, “I have no money in my pocket to take my family for treatment to other hospitals. I can’t even bear the transport expenses. I request the government to help me out otherwise all of us are going to die.”

Going blind

The six-year-old Ashmal Khan lost vision in one of his eyes in May 2008. Now the other eye is also losing vision, allegedly after being given an injection of Amoxil at the emergency ward of Polyclinic Hospital.

When things started getting worse, the family even went to Mayo Hospital, without any results. “I even had a miscarriage due to excessive travelling as we cannot afford proper transport. Thing just got worse,” Nazia Bibi, his mother, said.

Little Ashmal does not understand why he cannot go to school. “Is it because I cannot see properly mama?”

The almost non-existent health budget

Dr Sania Nishtar, a health expert, termed inadequate public funding, unregulated role of private sector and lack of overall transparency in governance as the main reason behind poor health system in the country.

In the current fiscal year, Rs16.9445 billion was allocated to the health division, which is less than 3 per cent of the budget.

Talking to The Express Tribune, Dr Nadeem Ehsan, Chairman National Assembly Standing Committee on Health said, “The health budget is meagre. It is unfortunate that our government is not taking the health issue seriously.”

He added, “[Also,] the duplication and multiplication of national programmes and health services is not helping the government achieve its set targets in health sector.”

However, Federal Health Secretary Nargis Sethi feels different. It is not the funds that are low but the implementation that needs to be improved.

Recently, while addressing a national conference on World Tuberculosis Day, she said, “No doubt the government is getting ample funds from international donors for these [health] programmes but unfortunately poor and ineffective implementation is the main reason behind unsatisfactory results.”

Published in The Express Tribune, April 7^th, 2011.