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Healthcare for Elderly a Dream Gone Sour
By Ashfaq Yusufzai,
Dawn Media Group
July 29, 2010
Pakistan
Government is yet to develop a policy to provide free medical care to the elderly population, despite planning to do so for the last two years ago, officials told Dawn on Wednesday.
“Government in collaboration with the World Health Organisation (WHO) planned to formulate a policy for provision of free healthcare to the elderly population which is yet to see light of the day,” they added.
According to them, health of the elderly people has emerged as an important issue globally, but planners in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government and Ministry of Health were yet to realise it.
“Provincial government was supposed to follow the instructions of the Ministry of Health in Islamabad in this regard but nothing was done,” they said. According to the 1998 census, elderly population with the age of 60 years or above in the country comprised 7.3 million or 5.6 per cent of the total population and it would touch 26.84 million (11 per cent of the total population) by 2025.
The officials said that according to two surveys conducted in 1994 and 1998, most of the elderly were living in the extended families and more than half of them were suffering from various illnesses and were dependent on their families.
The WHO, they said, has been urging the government to accord priority to the strengthening of the existing national programme aiming at provision of health care to the elderly.
They said the world health body had already conducted few seminars and workshop for the health professionals and policymakers to sensitise them for providing better healthcare to elderly population.
The WHO, they said, wanted the government to take concrete measures to improve health and social status of the elderly, besides identifying and solving common problems being faced by them.
The officials said a draft of the national strategic framework on health of the elderly was prepared in 2009 with the participation of the provinces aimed at providing free healthcare to the elderly persons, but the Ministry of Health did not shown any interest in it and the draft could not be approved to become a policy.
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