Daily Times

Ministry of National Health Services Regulation and Coordination on Thursday organized a second task force meeting of International Health Regulation (IHR), in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO).

The forum recommended that meetings of the IHR task force should be held regularly, coordination mechanism should be strengthened, the provincial-level task force should be notified and lessons learned should be used to build a resilient health system to tackle not only the COVID pandemic but any such calamity in the future.

Dr Faisal Sultan appreciated the efforts of his ministry and members of the task force in implementing IHR core capacities.

He acknowledged that COVID 19 has made us realized the critical role of health and non-health actors in implementing IHR core capacities in the country.

He said that Pakistan was fully committed to the Global Health Security Agenda in a coordinated, multi sectoral partnership approach, in close collaboration with the provincial Departments of Health, other sectors and health development partners as a global health safety responsibility.

He informed the forum that the government was in process of establishing a National Centers for Diseases Control (CDC) at the National Institute of Health (NIH) with a broader mandate to deal with health emergencies management and enhance emergency preparedness.

He reiterated the commitment of the Government of Pakistan to implementing IHR regulation 2005.

In his remarks, Dr Rana Safdar, Director General Health, informed that Pakistan was the first country in the ERO region to conduct the joint external evaluation. Since then, Pakistan has made considerable improvement in many areas like AMR, IDSR, etc, but a lot more needs to be done.

He added a lot of innovative steps have been taken during the Covid -19 and many lessons have been learned and can be used to build a resilient health system.

WHO Representative Dr Palitha Mahipala emphasized that the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a real-life opportunity to practice and strengthen event detection, assessment, prevention and response with effective monitoring.

The experience and lessons learned during the COVID-19 response must be evaluated as part of the due second Joint External Evaluation (JEE) for assessment of health systems performance in the overall IHR context.

He said that there is a crucial need to enhance the functionality of IHR implementation through sustainable interventions.

He added the executive coordination set ups created at the highest government level for COVID response require institutionalization as a national accountability mechanism for oversight on IHR implementation and compliance with the regular periodic multi-sectoral review process.

He assured that WHO was fully committed to support the government in all endeavors to implement International Health Regulations.

Pakistan is a signatory to International Health Regulations (2005) since 2007 and committed to implement, strengthen its capacity to prevent, detect and respond to health emergencies and disease outbreaks.

Moreover, Pakistan has been selected as one of the 17 Global Health Security Agenda, member states under global health security.

The objectives of the meeting were to discuss the progress and mechanism of leveraging IHR mechanisms within the country in the broader context of lessons learned from the COVID 19 pandemic with evidence-based reporting of the core capacities and health security financing.

The meeting was chaired by Special Assistant to Prime Minister on National Health Services, Dr Faisal Sultan and was attended by the esteem members of IHR- multi-sectoral task force comprising of provincial DGHS, IHR focal points, representatives of the line ministries and development health partners.