To save billions of rupees: Pakistan needs to spend on prevention of diseases to lower growing burden on hospitals

ISLAMABAD: Instead of spending billions of rupees on establishing more tertiary-care health facilities, Pakistan needs to adopt people-centric approach and set-up community-based primary-care centers to help people in preventing, delaying and managing chronic illnesses, leading public health experts and physicians said.

Deploring that patients were being ‘subjected to experiments’ without proper diagnosis, they called for making evidence-based diagnosis of diseases for the proper treatment and to save people from physical and financial agonies and further called for training nurses and allied health professionals in prevention and treatment of ailments to reduce burden on tertiary hospitals.

“Our hospitals focus on treatment of diseases but it is beyond their capacity as in a country with over 225 million people, number of patients is increasing day by day. What we need is establishment of community-based primary-care health and wellness centers for health promotion, disease prevention, treatment and rehabilitation”, Prof. Shahzad Ali Khan, Vice Chancellor, Health Services Academy (HSA) told 13th International Public Health Conference 2023.

National and international scholars, public health experts, physicians, scientists and researchers are attending the three-day moot being held at HSA and presenting their studies, research and presentations on different themes of public health, prevention of communicable and non-communicable diseases and health promotion.

Prof. Khan maintained that on directives from the President of Pakistan, they were going to launch Pakistan’s first mental health first aid programme, which would focused on training people in identifying the signs and symptoms of mental health issues and referring people with mental health issues to trained and qualified psychiatrists, psychologists and centers.

He said they had developed a mental health tool-kit in consultation with national and international experts to deal with psychiatric emergencies like self-harm, suicidal behaviour, substance abuse, violent & trauma affected behaviour and added that they would offer a training to providing essential services, frontline workers, health workers, community leaders and volunteers.

“Similarly, we are launching the community-based training programmes to train people in providing first-aid to those in distress while HSA is also going to establish health and wellness centers for promoting health and prevention as well as delaying diseases in the society”, he observed.

Chairman, Higher Education Commission (HEC) Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed deplored that hospitals across Pakistan were flooded with patients and most of the patients need ‘Sifarish’ to get proper treatment, which shows that Pakistan needs health promotion and preventive approach instead of spending more on establishing mega healthcare facilities.

Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed further said there was no culture of conducting evidence-based researches in Pakistan and most of the time, patients were being treated through ‘Jugar’ and experimentation while in the developed countries, patients were not being given targeted therapies as per their genetic makeup and requirements.

Calling for production of vaccines and treatment therapies locally, HEC chairman said it was not possible without getting knowledge, promoting the culture of research and improving the overall healthcare system in the country.

Renowned endocrinologist and diabetologist Prof. Abdul Basit said there was no household in the country where diabetics were not present at the moment and termed diabetes as Pakistan’s biggest health challenge that needs public-private partnership and attention to prevention loss of hundreds of thousands of lives annually.

“Every year, 400,000 people develop diabetic foot ulcers and get their lower limbs amputated. This is making Pakistan as a nation of permanently disabled people. But we can prevent amputation by 90% by training primary care diabetes physicians, diabetes educators and podiatrists”, he maintained.

Prof. Basit maintained that in a country with 33 million diabetics, they had launched a diabetes care programme at national level and their plan is to establish around 3000 diabetes clinics across Pakistan to treat diabetes patients and prevent them from getting permanently disabled due to complications of diabetes.

President Allied Health Professionals Council (AHPC) Zamarud Khan said no healthcare facility or professional could work without the assistance of allied healthcare professionals and added that they were going to train hundreds of thousands of such professionals to play their role in prevention and treatment of diseases in the country.

Secretary Health Balochistan Abdullah Khan as well as experts and officials from Nutrition International, Save the Children International, Marie Stopes Society, Getz Pharma, Federal Directorate of Immunization (FDI), National Institute of Health (NIH) and several other institutions also presented their researches and studies on the first day of conference, which would continue till Wednesday.