KARACHI: The Pakistani health authorities have said that they would cooperate with Afghanistan in improving its healthcare infrastructure, which has been affected badly due to the conflict, adding they have asked the Afghan authorities to ‘define their health needs’ for assistance from Pakistan.
“We will let them (Afghans) define their needs and then work out what needs to done, priority wise,” Special Assistant to Prime Minister (SAPM) on Health Dr Faisal Sultan told The News when asked how Pakistan was going to help Afghanistan in improving its health facilities and providing better health services to people in distress.
Pakistan has already established a 300-bed tertiary-care health facility in Kabul, titled “Muhammad Ali Jinnah Hospital”, which is the only functional public health facility at the moment with 50 oxygenated beds for Covid-19 patients, a Pakistani doctor present in Kabul said but called for more assistance from Pakistan and other neighbouring countries to avoid a health crisis.
Dr Faisal Sultan maintained that they were working on as to how the National Health Services, and other national health institutions could help Afghanistan in the area of health and medical services.
“Afghans are in need of health services as many foreign healthcare workers, including doctors, paramedics and even locals have left the country. Female nurses are afraid and many of them are not joining their duties. Muhammad Ali Jinnah Hospital in Kabul is functioning properly but it is unable to meet the health needs of Kabul and many other cities,” an official at the NHS said.
The official maintained that daily hundreds of people, including women and children from Afghanistan, were trying to cross borders to seek medical assistance in Pakistan and added that at the moment, those in need of immediate health assistance were being allowed to enter the country to seek medical assistance at hospitals in Quetta, Peshawar and other cities of the country. “But there is an urgent need to help the authorities in Afghanistan to improve health infrastructure to meet the medical needs of people locally. We are working on it with Afghan authorities and a comprehensive plan would be launched shortly,” the official added.
On the other hand, Vice Chancellor University of Health Sciences (UHS) Prof. Javed Akram said their University had been approached by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) for the training of Afghan healthcare workers and added that they would soon launch a training programme for the Afghan doctors, paramedics and nurses to improve healthcare services in their country.
“UHS has been contacted by Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah for capacity building of healthcare providers, which we will be doing InshaAllah with utmost pleasure after approvals from our and new Afghan government,” Prof. Javed Akram told The News. The Health Services Academy (HSA), Islamabad, also claimed that they would be training Afghan healthcare managers in the area of public health, vaccination, infection control and other areas.
“HSA has selected 15 managers for training in public health and in a few months, we will take around 50 more managers for training in the Health Services Academy,” Vice Chancellor HSA Prof Shahzad Ali Khan told The News.
