Public-private partnerships: ‘Sindh govt committed to transforming emergency healthcare’

2.7m children treated in ChildLife Foundation emergency rooms

KARACHI: The Sindh government is dedicated to transforming emergency care services in collaboration with the private sector, said Sindh Health Minister Dr Azra Fazal Pechuho at a briefing about the upgrading of emergency rooms in Sindh. She added that the ChildLife Foundation has led the way in showing the model for emergency healthcare through its management of emergency rooms for children.

“We are committed to ensuring better utilisation of scarce resources through public-private partnerships,” said the minister, adding that the provision of better emergency care through these partnerships had saved many lives. She claimed that the provincial government was working closely with the private sector and communities across Sindh to ensure that no child was deprived of access to healthcare.

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Dr Ahson Rabbani, the CEO of the ChildLife Foundation, said that their partnership with the Sindh government had enabled them to treat around 2.7 million children and quadruple the survival rates in resuscitation rooms over the last eight years. The foundation is now saving the lives of a million children in its emergency rooms annually, he claimed, adding that it was also using telemedicine to provide consultations in remote areas in Sindh.

Currently, the ChildLife Foundation has state-of-the-art emergency rooms for children at the Mother and Child Hospital in Shaheed Benazirabad, Chandka Medical College Hospital in Larkana, and Civil Hospital, National Institute of Child Health, Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, Sindh Government Hospital Korangi-5 and Sindh Government Lyari General Hospital in Karachi.

Dr Rabbani said that additional facilities would be set up in Sukkur, Hyderabad and Quetta, while the foundation would also set up telemedicine satellite centres in over 100 government hospitals over the next three years.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 6^th, 2019.