PESHAWAR: The provincial health department is forming a task force to supervise and give advice regarding gaps in provision of health facilities to South Waziristan displaced people residing in Dera Ismail Khan and Tank districts.
‘The government has registered 19,548 families with 149,934 individuals from South Waziristan. All of them are residing with host communities because camps couldn’t be established in view of ethnic problems and general law and order situation,’ said officials.
Therefore, they added, health facilities in union councils where the displaced people were living with host communities were being strengthened.
The decision to form the six-member task force, comprising a gynaecologist, a public health expert and a surgeon and one member each from the WHO, Unicef and UNFPA, was taken at a meeting held recently at the WHO office in Islamabad.
The meeting, co-chaired by WHO’s country representative Dr Khalife Mahmud Bile and NWFP health director-general Dr Fazal Mahmood and attended by executive district officers (health) of Tank, D. I. Khan, Lakki Marwat and Bannu, discussed the health scenario of the displaced people. It decided that the task force would be visiting these districts and would identify gaps in health facilities to the provincial health department and the WHO.
At the meeting, the WHO official handed over 26 emergency health kits to the EDO of D. I. Khan, which can cater to 146,000 persons for two months and 16 kits for 96,000 persons to the EDO of Tank, apart from handing over three inter-agency emergency health kits for 30,000 people. Three cholera kits were also provided to D. I. Khan.
The world health agency also pledged to provide a state-of-the-art mobile clinical laboratory to enable health professionals to provide diagnostic services to displaced families.
Dr Mahmood told Dawn on Tuesday that the decision to form the task force was necessitated by the fact that UN officials could not visit the troubled spots because of security problems.
The WHO, he said, was also starting three-day training of doctors and health professionals of D. I. Khan and Tank districts on disease early warning system (DEWS) from Nov 3. ‘We are implementing DEWS in Tank and D. I. Khan to know about the trend of diseases and take timely measures in case of epidemics,’ he said.
A WHO official said the two districts had a weak referral system due to which the displaced people could face problems in case of serious medical conditions. For this purpose, he said, four ambulances, two each for D. I. Khan and Tank, would soon be given to the executive district officers by the WHO so that the seriously-ill IDPs could be transported to nearest health facilities.
He said the people displaced from Waziristan were being diverted from Lakki Marwat and Bannu districts to D. I. Khan and Tank and health facilities in the latter two districts were being strengthened.
Dr Mahmood said the EDOs concerned had been directed to hold IDPs health cluster meetings on weekly basis and inform the provincial health office.
The WHO had also pledged essential drugs for the displaced people, he said.
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