‘Ehsaas Tahafuz to be upscaled to 14 tertiary care hospitals soon’

ISLAMABAD: Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Poverty Alleviation and Social Protection, Dr. Sania Nishtar Friday said the Ehsaas Tahafuz programme would be upscaled soon to 14 tertiary care hospitals nationwide.

Ehsaas Tahafuz is Pakistan’s first shock-oriented safety net programme. Currently, it is fully operational in HFH, Rawalpindi. According to its predefined scope, ‘Ehsaas Tahafuz’ caters to patients facing catastrophic health expenditures, who are not covered by ‘Sehat Sahulat’ Card or are in hospital not registered with ‘Sehat Sahulat’ programme. The programme, administered by the Poverty Alleviation and Social Safety Division (PASSD), is being expanded to 14 tertiary care hospitals across Punjab, Sindh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Islamabad.

Tahafuz, under the umbrella of Ehsaas, is a patient centric, shock-oriented programme that caters to one-time catastrophic health costs for those who lack the ability to bear the heavy expenditures.

Dr. Sania Nishtar made an unannounced visit to Tahafuz Desk in Holy Family Hospital (HFH), Rawalpindi on Friday to stock take the progress of Ehsaas Tahafuz operations. During the visit, she met with patients and their attendants, technical team of medical experts, hospital administrators and programme verifiers. Dr. Sania also visited Emergency, Ophthalmology and ICU wards and took feedback from patients and their attendants about the medical support extended through ‘Tahafuz’. “Patient feedback and first-hand insights will help in the Ehsaas Tahafuz scale-up, later this year”, Dr. Sania said.

To-date, 612 deserving patients have been served at HFH, Rawalpindi. To serve patients in need, a facilitation desk has also been established at the HFH to identify the eligible beneficiaries for ‘Tahafuz’.

The scale and scope of the programme is being upscaled based on lessons of the recently concluded pilot with HFH. ‘Ehsaas Tahafuz’ will work with public hospitals to identify patients facing catastrophic health expenditures, who will then be assessed by the system, and if eligible, will be provided funding by allocating donations to the patient.

Once fully operationalized nationwide, ‘Ehsaas Tahafuz will set up a one window paperless and web-based precision safety net. It will also have funders’ empowerment features in terms of micro transaction alerts, and personalised login credentials for detailed web-viewing right down to the micro-transaction level.