For a healthy Pakistan: Sindh struggles to replicate ‘Sehat ka Insaf’ drive

Southern province has a high target to achieve if it wishes to share Peshawar’s success in disease vaccinations.

ISLAMABAD:

As Sindh wound up the first phase of its anti-polio campaign on Sunday, the southern province found itself struggling to keep up with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s successful Sehat ka Insaf campaign that targeted nine vaccine-preventable diseases.

With no image-building mechanism to buttress it and without proper planning, the Sindh campaign has floundered.

“The result of the first campaign in Karachi was not satisfactory as we had a target of 500,000 children in 19 union councils, but only 365,000 were vaccinated against polio,” an official of the Sindh health department told The Express Tribune. “Meanwhile, 2,329 refusals were reported.”

Moreover, the only brainstorming took place after the media published news stories about the Sindh government’s lack of planning for the campaign. The brainstorming session was held to find a new name for the Sindh campaign to delink it from the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf-led ‘Sehat ka Insaf’, the official said.

The focal person for polio in Sindh and former focal person to the prime minister on polio, Shehnaz Wazir Ali, revealed that they have planned to name the campaign ‘Bachon ki Sehat’ (health of children). The provincial government already conducted the first phase of the campaign without a name.

Similar to the Sehat ka Insaf model, the drive included administering vaccines of not just for polio but nine other diseases, she explained.

However, Sunday’s campaign in Karachi focused only on vaccinating children under the age of five against polio. Sehat ka Insaf in Peshawar is an all-encompassing health drive, which not only focuses on polio but all other disease like dengue and other waterborne diseases; it also concentrates on improving the coverage of routine immunisation; hygiene kits are distributed and medical camps are also set up as part of the campaign.

The official claimed that all this was missing in Sindh’s case. “It took three months for the K-P government to plan and launch Sehat ka Insaf in Peshawar, but the Sindh government abruptly began the drive without proper planning.”

Moreover, Sindh started this campaign at low-risk areas rather than carrying it out in the high-risk zones of the metropolis.

Talking to The Express Tribune, a PTI official in Peshawar, who wished not to be named, revealed that PTI has spent over Rs70 million to run a media campaign across the country to create awareness among the people about Sehat ka Insaf. To yield better results, the K-P government is all set to change the sewerage pipelines at high-risk union councils (UCs) of Larma and Shaheen Muslim Town in Peshawar, he announced. “Sewerage water affected by the poliovirus is one of the major ways the disease spreads,” the PTI official explained.

However, no such forward planning seems to be part of Sindh’s drive.

“The only thing that made this anti-polio drive in Karachi similar to Sehat ka Insaf was the reduction of working hours of polio health workers, from 10 hours to six hours, to make them less prone to terrorist attacks,” said the Sindh health department official.

The major success of Sehat ka Insaf was the 50% reduction in the refusal rate, which has dropped from 7,000 to 3,500. Sindh has a high target to achieve if it wishes to emulate the campaign and share Peshawar’s success.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 26^th, 2014.