The devolution of the Health Ministry to provinces has jeopardized the National Hepatitis Control Programme (NHCP) as provinces are not ready to earmark the required funds for the project and hence the lives of millions of patients suffering from the disease are at stake.
According to the Health Ministry statistics, 12 million people in Pakistan are suffering from hepatitis B and C and NHCP is the only hope for thousands of poor patients since its private treatment is very expensive. A Health Ministry official told Pakistan Today on condition of anonymity that all provinces had refused to allocate funds for ten special national health programmes including the HCP.
He said the provincial health secretaries, in a meeting with the Health Ministry, welcomed the decision of devolution but said that if the federal government wanted to continue the programmes it should keep funding them for the next five years. They said they would not accommodate the staff working on these programmes.
“The provincial secretaries said that funding for all vertical programmes, currently implemented by the provinces, is routed through the federal government’s Health Ministry and after the devolution, the same funds will be under the control of the provincial finance ministries, which will provide funds to their departments according to their own priorities,” said the official.
The first phase of the programme was launched in August 2005 with Rs 2.59 billion allocated to the hepatitis prevention programme but unfortunately all went in vain as the number of patients is increasing every passing day.
After the failure of the first phase, now the federal government has allocated Rs 13.9 billion to the second phase of the project, which started in November 2010 and would end in 2015.
The former manager of this programme Dr Sharif Khan was removed from his post for corruption allegations.
NHCP Deputy Programme Manager Dr Bashir Siddique, while talking to Pakistan Today, said, “One of the biggest successes of this programme is that we are going to build the first liver transplant center in Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), which will be operational next month.”
He said in the second phase, they had targeted to treat 10 thousand hepatitis B and C patients and were already providing free treatment to high-risk groups such as paramedics, medical student vaccinators, sweepers and drug abusers. He said the programme was basically designed to ensure prevention and control of hepatitis and treatment was only a part of it.
He said the second phase of the programme had five components: programme management and surveillance; case management and care; prevention; training, education and awareness rising and research and publication.