AKISTAN has medical device rules. It has a therapeutic goods framework.
What it does not have is a policy-andthe differencebetweenrules and policy is the difference between walls and a foundation.
A policy framework is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is the foundation that tells every stakeholder investor, regulator, clinician, manufacturer,importer-whatthis sector is trying to become. Without it, each ministry reads the sector through its own lens.
Finance sees revenue. Commerce sees a trade balance. Health sees a procurement challenge. Nobody is wrong, but nobody is reading from the same page either.
What a National Medical Device Policy needs to do is not complicated to state, even if it takes real political will to deliver. It needs to define Pakistan’s medical device sector notas a subset of pharmaceuticals, not as a customs category, but as a strategic national asset with its own identity, its own supply chain logic, and its own relationship to public health outcomes.
HDAP has been making this case since long to the Board of Investment, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Commerce, and SIFC. The policy framework we have proposed follows a natural progression: starting with imports that ensure uninterrupted patient access; moving through toll manufacturing and local assembly that build technical capability; advancing to full local manufacturing held to international quality standards; then joint ventures that bring for-eign technology and capital into the sector; and ultimately an export orientation that positions Pakistani devices in regional markets.
That institutional work several months of structured engagement with regulators, ministries, and international counterparts represents exactly the kind of sectoral knowledge that a national medical device policy cannot afford to be written without. HDAP has the data, the knowledge, the expertise, and the depth to contribute meaningfully to that process. It is formally putting that contribution on the table.
The foundation is not a luxury. In any house worth living in, it is what makes everything above it stable, durable, and possible.