With Save the Children’s recent report ‘State of the World’s Mothers 2013’, another healthcare shortfall in Pakistan is brought to light. According to the findings of the report, Pakistan ranks third in the world for newborn deaths, even beating the heavily populated China in terms of the number of newborn deaths each year.
Stillbirth deaths are thought to be the highest in Pakistan; 16 percent of babies are born too early, 32 percent of babies are born with low birth weight and 12,000 women lose their lives during childbirth or pregnancy every year in Pakistan.
That’s too many grim statistics all together, and a stark call for political parties to ponder over how sustainable their healthcare policies are. And when one talks of a sustainable plan in healthcare, nothing rides as high as preventive care and awareness about various common diseases.
A paper by Neil Wollman, senior fellow at Bentley University, makes a strong case for preventive healthcare policies, claiming that preventive policies geared towards educating citizens could go a long way towards cutting down healthcare costs in future.
“Evidence shows that infant and child mortality rates become lowest in countries with high shares of health care spending devoted to primary (preventive) healthcare facilities,” further highlighted a 2007 paper by Pakistan Institute of Development Economics.
All these stress the need to revive preventive healthcare policies in Pakistan that the country had seen an avid focus on not very long ago. These include lady health worker programmes and associated campaigns, malaria control programmes, TB and HIV control programmes, programme for prevention and control of hepatitis and aids and many more.
The only preventive healthcare policy that has really seen some spotlight is polio prevention, but that has also lost ground to political motives and uncalled for antagonism from fundamentalist forces. More so, the policies ought to be oriented towards the rural poor than be restricted to urban areas alone.
While these may seem convenient scapegoats at times when the fiscal deficit has to be rationalized, the long-term implications in the form of increased curative expenditures could be quite a blow to future budgetary deficits.
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Top 10 countries with most first-day deaths
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No of 1st
day deaths
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India 309,300
Nigeria 89,700
Pakistan 59,800
China 50,600
DR Congo 48,400
Ethiopia 28,800
Bangladesh 28,100
Indonesia 23,400
Afghanistan 18,000
Tanzania 17,000
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Source: Save the Children
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