In order to improve patient’s care through the availability of HR and medicines ensuring managing and providing equipment and buildup emergency services in these facilities as decided by the health department to outsource 58 more hospitals to private organisations.
The plan to outsource the hospital was shared by committee headed by Dr Shaheen Afridi, the director-general health service Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. To identify the low performing health facilities and subsequently the committee took into consideration data of district health information system (DHIS) and Independent Monitoring Unit (IMU) against the targets of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) for outsourcing.
As per the officials said it is mandatory to consider the improvement areas for outsourcing so that the health services would be available for entire province.
Further added that the patients are suffering in the hospital due to old machines as they are out of order needed to be investigated, unavailability of staff and the supplies of medicines and administrative issues whereas on the other hand the contracted facilities were operated by private firms, which sure the maintenance of equipment for uninterrupted machines, availability of staff and medicines.
This would help in improving patient’s care and availability of staff.
They further said that another important factor that needs to be focused is the improvement in the quality of the care in the outsourced facilities. Staff training, display of standards and protocols, keen monitoring and having patients feedback would be the basic part of this partnership.
Officials said that the facilities outsourced to private firm as per Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Public-Private Partnership Act by the Health Foundation (HF) because of their poor performance that needa to be improved now.
The outsourced facilities would be under the control of health department but their administration would be under private parties which will be working under the relevant district health officers (DHOs) and hospital review committees (RMCs). Headed by DHO, the RMC in a district is consisted of medical superintendent, additional deputy commissioner, project director of private firm, representative of district account office and district specialist co-opted member.
There would be a meeting within three months holded by the committee to have a review of progress at local level whereas Health Foundation and Independent Monitoring Unit will have a keen monitoring over assigned outlets at provincial level.
As per the officials, they are working on the idea and within short period of time 58 health facilities would be assigned in different district for outsourcing. They further added that Expression of Interest (EoI) documents was being finalized, whereas Type D hospitals besides few Type C and Type B would be outsourced by the health facilities.
A collective assessment report shared early this year shows that the 19 health facilities which was outsourced by private firm an year or 2 ago has came up with improvement as compared to the non-outsourced ones. The early contracted out facilities are located in South and North Waziristan, Kohistan, Bajaur, Kurram, Khyber, Orakzai and Chitral districts.
Thr non-outsourced Category-D hospital in Gara Tajik, Peshawar, and Category-D hospital in Razmak, North Waziristan, did not have emergency and in-patients services whereas only general OPD was available at Razmak hospital, consisting of only one medical officer at the time as per reports.
As per the servey conducted by the third party in 2021, covered each parameter of service delivery and noted that most of the services were available in both the outsourced and non-outsourced hospitals. 4 non-outsourced and 3 outsourced were inspected for the assessment.
22% of beds were occupied as of outsourced facilities whereas 18% of the non-outsourced hospitals. The non-outsourced hospitals inspected for the assessment including district headquarters hospitals of Lakki Marwat.
