KP govt decides to continue free treatment of cancer patients

Rs70m released for immediate purchase of drugs

PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has decided to continue providing funds for free treatment of cancer patients in the province and released Rs70 million for immediate purchase of the required drugs.

While appreciating the provision of free drugs to the cancer patients and upholding transparency in purchase of medicines, Chief Minister Pervez Khattak decided to continue the project and allocate more funds in the Annual Development Programme (ADP) with a handsome increase every year in its budget.

 Senior officials of the provincial Health Department told The News that the decision to allocate funds for the project was made during a meeting held here with Chief Minister Pervez Khattak in the chair.

Besides others, Prof Dr Abid Jameel, head of Medical Oncology department of Hayatabad Medical Complex (HMC) and Sahibzada Mohammad Saeed, chairman Board of governors of HMC, also attended the meeting.

“The government is committed to provide facilities to cancer patients and funds will be issued soon to HMC to continue free cancer treatment for the patients,” a senior official said. 

He said the chief minister directed the concerned authorities to release funds for free cancer treatment at the earliest and without any interruption.

“The chief minister also directed the authorities to submit PC-I for the first ever Hospice for terminal cancer patients at Hayatabad Medical Complex. Both the construction of Hospice and free cancer treatment will start soon,” said the official. 

According to sources, the project was declared transparent during its monitoring and evaluation.   

Presently, the government agreed to release Rs70 million for immediate purchase of drugs for the coming four months.

Keeping in view the unprecedented rise in cancer patients in the province and its adjoining tribal areas due to a number of reasons and primarily because of excessive use of explosives, the government decided to increase the funds with the passage of time.

It decided to release Rs300 million for 2016-17 and increase it up to Rs380 million in 2017-18. In 2018-19, funds for free cancer drugs would be increased to Rs470 million.

 Also, the project nomenclature has already been changed from Begum Nusrat Bhutto Oncology Services to Project for Access to Cancer Treatment (PACT).

It was apparently one of the reasons that the Pakistan Tehreek-I-Insaf-led government had stopped providing funds for the project as it was named after the late leader of the Pakistan People’s Party Begum Nusrat Bhutto.

If it had done one thing good in health sector, the previous ANP-PPP government initiated this innovative project for helping the poor patients in the treatment of cancer.

The government and drug manufacturer, Novartis signed an agreement under “public-private partnership” in 2011.

Under the agreement, the government was supposed to purchase two months of treatment for the first three years while Novartis agreed to provide the rest of 10 months treatment free of cost to the patients. 

Prof Dr Abid Jameel was appointed the focal person of the project and HMC was declared as focal point, where all cancer patients of the province were supposed to get free medicine since 2011.

Following positive evaluation report and successful completion of phase-I of the project, the government expanded it to phase-II for additional 445 patients.

The sources said that phase-III of the project has already been prepared in which free medicines for patients suffering from breast cancer, kidney cancer and all other forms of the deadly disease had been included.

When reached on telephone, Prof Dr Abid Jameel said they had enrolled 2,000 cancer patients in the province to provide them free cancer drugs.

They include 1,320 patients suffering from Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia (CML) and 650 from other types of cancer.

Health experts said that cancer treatment is expensive and out of reach for most of the patients in Pakistan.

According to experts, the cost of treatment for one cancer patient is Rs1.4 million to Rs3.6 million.