Peshawar - Peshawar Medical College (PMC) in collaboration with Department of Health Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Trust for Vaccines & Immunizations (TVI), Prime Foundation (PF), Aga Khan University, Karachi, and the Centre for Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children, Canada has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for launching of an integrated maternal, new born, child health and immunization pilot project.
The objectives of the project are to improve the MNCH practices and services, particularly in the COVID-19 context including routine childhood immunization, improved breast-feeding practices, hand washing promotion, best possible sanitary practices, and optimal diarrhoea management, to enhance community engagement and knowledge to improve care seeking behaviours and health behaviours, to create a replicable model of private health sector engagement that can be adopted by the government for long-term sustainability of the interventions and to assess the feasibility of adopting an electronic birth and immunization registry.
According to the MoU, the 18-month pilot project will focus on improving the health of women and children. The project will concentrate on rebuilding health and immunization systems that have been disrupted or halted due to COVID-19. The project will engage private sector health care providers including medical practitioners and physicians in two targeted high risk union council (UCs) of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to optimise the quality of maternal and child health services, nutrition interventions and coverage of routine immunization. Project team will liaison with EPI to arrange vaccines for the private practitioners to ensure free-of-cost vaccination services at their clinics.
The project aims to create a replicable model of private sector engagement that can be adopted by the government for long-term sustainability. The project will assess the feasibility of adopting an electronic birth and immunization registry with the help of an immunization app, Sehat Nishani.
It is worth mentioning that PMC with AKU in the past had pioneered the introduction of injectable polio vaccine for the first time in the country that paved the way for its full-scale inclusion in the EPI program. BMJ South Asia Award was awarded to the project for its high impact in the country and for the region especially the innovation it offered to engage families and communities in integrated manner in a conflict afflicted setting.