COLLEAGUE told me, just before I took over, that trade associations in Pakistan are good at one thing: writing letters nobody reads. I took that personally.
Some of that work has been unglamorous. Tracking registration applications file by file.
Sitting in waiting rooms.
Writing follow-up letters to follow-up letters. Learning, in more detail than I everexpected, how a government tender for surgical dressings gets structured and why it makes no sense for anything that is not a tablet or a capsule.
But the ground has shifted. The arguments this sector has been making for years about pending registration files, taxation, procurement rules, updating MDR 2017 and building a regulatory framework that fits this sector are finding receptive ears.
Regulators have moved. Ministries have engaged.
The online medical device application system is one example of what happens when industry and government decide to solve the same problem together. That kind of progress does not come from confrontation. It comes when both sides sit down with the same problem in front of them.
I will not declare victory. This sector has seen promising moments before. What feels different now is that our case is no longer built on appeals it is built on data, precedent and a depth of institutional engagement. When both sides can look at the same data what taxation at 18 per cent means for access, for affordability, for the patients at the end of the supply chain the conversation moves from negotiation to problem-solving. That is the kind of dialogue this sector has been working towards.
This supplement brings together the voices of Pakistan’s healthcare industry, because the moment we are in requires exactly that.
To every manufacturer, importer, distributor, clinician and hospital administrator reading this: this is not the time to stay on the sidelines.
Policy windows open and close. The associations and companies that have stayed quiet because advocacy felt pointless: now is precisely the wrong time for that.
Pakistan’s patients deserve a healthcare devices sector that works.
We are closer to that than we have been in a long time a sector that doesn’t just import more efficiently, but one that eventually makes things, employs people and competes.