LAHORE: Punjab has now spent more than Rs36.5 billion on free treatment under its specialised health programmes, roughly double the Rs18 billion it reported in June, as transplants, child heart surgeries and dialysis sessions continue to climb at private and public hospitals contracted by the provincial government.
The figure was presented on Wednesday at the 120th board meeting of the Punjab Health Initiative Management Company (PHIMC), which runs the schemes through empanelled hospitals. Health Minister Khawaja Salman Rafique, who chaired the meeting, said waiting lists for adult heart surgery, cancer care, dialysis, stroke treatment, children’s heart operations and transplants had fallen significantly, and directed hospitals to shorten them further. He did not give waiting-list figures.
The transplant programme has carried out 2,912 procedures: 1,345 kidney transplants, 1,000 cochlear implants, 429 liver transplants, 70 bone marrow transplants and 68 corneal transplants. In early June the total stood at 1,956, meaning nearly 1,000 procedures were added in about four months, including 385 kidney and 114 liver transplants.
Under the children’s heart surgery programme, more than 16,391 children have been operated on free of charge. About 1,400 of them came from outside Punjab: 682 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 422 from Azad Kashmir, 147 from Islamabad, 66 from Gilgit-Baltistan, 48 from Balochistan and 35 from Sindh, a reach that makes the scheme a national service in practice.
More than 50,753 patients are registered for free dialysis, up from about 42,000 in June. The government said 2.484 million patients had received dialysis, a figure that appears to count individual sessions rather than people, since kidney patients typically need two or three sessions a week.
The cancer initiative, which covers diagnosis, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery and medical therapy at hospitals run by the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and others, has 48,188 registered patients, while free treatment has been provided to more than 163,326 cancer patients. The release did not explain the gap between the two numbers.
In adult cardiac care, 9,213 patients have enrolled and 2,409 have undergone free heart surgery. The minister put annual spending at Rs3 billion for adult cardiac surgery, Rs10 billion for cancer and about Rs1.25 billion for stroke. In June, the government had cited Rs13 billion a year for cancer and more than Rs3 billion for stroke, and it did not say whether budgets had been revised.
Specialised Healthcare Secretary Azmat Mehmood told the board that patients’ complaints at empanelled hospitals should be resolved as a priority. Board members, the Punjab Healthcare Commission chief and officials of the finance and planning departments attended.
Capacity remains the pressure point. Lahore’s Rs16 billion Jinnah Institute of Cardiology was still waiting to begin heart surgery last month, leaving much of the programme dependent on a limited number of contracted hospitals.
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