PESHAWAR
The Special Secretary for Health Ata- ur-Rehman has termed sustainable health system mandatory to control and eliminate HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria diseases from the province, adding that all stockholders should work under an effective strategy to overcome new challenges in the health sector.
All concerned departments and heads of the different programs in the health sector should boost their coordination to devise better policies and plans against the pandemics and controlling communicable disease in KP, he added.
Addressing a workshop organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Solutions for Sustainable Development Initiatives (SSDI) to facilitate the development of the Resilient and Sustainable System for Health (RSSH) component of The Global Fund funding request for Pakistan held in Peshawar today.
The workshop is part of Pakistan’s application process for the 2023-2025 funding cycle for window-1 to be submitted soon.
Senior government functionaries and private sector stakeholders including Additional Secretary, Fayaz Sherpao, Director Public Health Dr Nek Dad Khan, WHO’s provincial Head of Office Dr Babar Alam, Provincial Program Managers of HIV, TB, and Malaria and EPI programs, a representative from P&D department, planning, and development wing of the DoH, civil society representatives, private sector, principal and sub-recipients of GF grants, and other relevant stakeholders attended the workshop.
DG Health Dr Shaukat Ali asserted on this occasion that every effort would be made to make the programs more self-reliant and run along horizontal lines to bring about a tangible improvement in the service delivery, particularly at the community level by capacity building of the lady health workers.
Earlier Dr Riaz Hussain Solangi Executive Director of SSDI outlined the objectives of the workshop and briefed the participants regarding the various aspects of Global Fund funding request for the 2023-25 funding cycle, especially in the context of RSSH component, and to identify the issues, gaps, and challenges related to each of the RSSH areas and suggest recommended actions to consolidate and incorporate into the funding request.
He shared with the participants a highly inclusive and participatory approach that involved the participation of all the relevant stakeholders, ensuring prioritization of high-quality interventions that were well aligned with National Health Vision 2016-25 and National and Provincial HIV, TB, and Malaria strategic plans, and country priorities.
Dr Nek Dad Khan called for designing all the strategies within the Provincial Health Policy’s ambit and integrating efforts for optimizing the outcomes concerning the three diseases.
He called for adopting a holistic approach in the implementation of all interventions.
Dr Babar Alam highlighted that WHO was assisting the process in the preparation of The Global Fund and in view of the climate change and manmade scenarios that necessitated having a resilient health system capable of coping with all the ongoing and unforeseen challenges.
Although The Global Fund was the main donor for the control and elimination of these diseases, efforts should be expedited towards self-reliance and reducing external dependance for all communicable disease control efforts.
He called for integration of efforts through a Multisectoral Accountability Framework with the involvement of other sectors.
He maintained that while disease control efforts were integrated at the service delivery level, they needed to be removed at the provincial level as well to avoid duplication and wastage of resources.
Dr Ghulam Nabi Kazi, a senior public health specialist, while facilitating the discussions called for addressing the social determinants of health and advocated ‘Health Beyond Health’ by involving the other social sectors.
He pointed out that in 2021 only 55 percent of the national TB burden of 611,000 were detected and stressed that it would not be possible to achieve SDG 3 or any of its indicators unless there was a tremendous up-scaling of efforts and the adoption of proven cost-effective strategies.
He also called for an increase in the domestic spending on Health
In his welcoming comments, the Provincial Manager for Tuberculosis Control Dr Mudassir Shahzad thanked the WHO and SSDI for their role in the proposal development in coordination with the Federal Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination and the Common Management Unit (CMU). He expected that the consolidated application will be submitted to the Global Fund before the deadline of March 20, 2023.
It may be mentioned that Pakistan is one of the 10 countries to be supported by WHO for the preparation of the RSSH component of the Global Fund funding application, as part of the strategic initiative “South-South Learning and strategic support to countries”. The successful implementation of the RSSH component of the funding request will contribute significantly to building a more resilient and sustainable health system in Pakistan.
