Health Facilities Outsourced in KP Show Exceptional Results
by Hamna Bano
SHARES
Peshawar: The outsourced facilities to private firms have shown exceptional performance compared to the previously held by government outlets. The information has been provided by a comparative assessment.
Adam Smith International, an international organization held this assessment in 2021. From the year 2013 to 2019 the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has outsourced a total of 20 health facilities. Out of these 20, 10 facilities are completely functional and the rest of the 10 are being developed.
These facilities were outsourced under the Public-Private Partnership Act 2014. The basic purpose was to provide human resource management and availability of medicines in the hospital to improve patient care. This was done to strengthen the emergency care and secure maintenance of the equipment.
A total of 7 facilities were assessed in 2021 by a third party. It included four non-outsourced and three outsourced facilities. On inspection, it was noticed that both outsourced and non-outsourced hospitals delivered the services.
Looking at the assessment the Government of KPK has decided to hand over primary healthcare services to private firms in 15 districts in the province.
The assessment included that, “Category-D Hospital in Gara Tajik, Peshawar, and Category-D Hospital in Razmak, North Waziristan, (non-outsourced) did not have emergency and in-patients services. In the OPD services at Razmak hospital, only general OPD was available with only one medical officer at the time of the visit.”
It was noticed that outsourced hospitals had a bed occupancy of 22 percent and non-outsourced had around 18 percent.
The outsourced hospitals had an average bed occupancy rate of 22 per cent while non-outsourced ones had at average bed occupancy rate of 18 per cent, said the assessment.https://t.co/F5nX2N48Kl
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“From our observations of physical condition, we noted that the facilities in all outsourced hospitals were better than non-outsourced hospitals under basic amenities, basic equipment and hygiene and waste management. In the overall score, the outsourced facilities received 89 points and non-outsourced 55 points. In service delivery, the score of outsourced hospitals was 83 percent and non-outsourced 62 percent while in human resource availability,” said the report.
