Minister for Capital Administration and Development Division (CADD) Dr Tariq Fazal Chaudhry on Saturday said that a partnership between media and health professionals was essential to further improve the service delivery system in the health sector.
Addressing a day-long seminar on “Healthcare and Media Partnership in Emergencies”, organized by Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), the minister said that this partnership between media and health professionals would be helpful to address the issues and ultimate the patients would have standard services at hospitals.
He said that the media was playing its role in a responsible manner and creating awareness in public on many important health and social issues which were uncommon to public.
He said that media was a good source of information for people and they could get best possible knowledge from media. He added both print and electronic media have its importance.
He said that in disaster like situations and incidents like PIA plane crash incident, country’s people had got reliable information only through media at their homes. Vice-Chancellor Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Medical University, PIMS Prof Javed Akram said that there was a need to strengthen the coordination between media and medical practitioners for creating awareness in public on diseases.
PIMS Administrator Dr Altaf Hussain said that such interaction between health reporters and medical professionals was essential to understand the grievances of patients and evolving a mechanism to resolve these grievances.
He said that the hospital administration would start a series of interactive sessions with health reporters for capacity-building and for effective use of media tools to educate people on medical issues.
An interactive session was also arranged to find communication gaps and way forward with panel of health journalists including Nadeem Chaudhry, Yawar Abbas, Qazi Ziyad and Neelum Arshed. Later, the minister distributed certificates among the participants of media workshop.
