PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunlchwa health department has established Independent Monitoring Unit (IMU) to regularly evaluate performance of the public sector healthcare facilities and take measures to improve quality of services at the government hospitals in the province.

The project has been reflected in the province`s Annual Development Programme with an outlay of Rs478.9 million, seeking to give complete picture of the services in the government facilities.

More than 175 monitors, mostly graduates, have been recruited for the purpose through National Testing Services with each district having seven monitors, who will visit health facilities on rotational basis. Onemonitor will not visit the same facility again.

The three-year project is also meant to collect data about the healthcare outlets regarding their locations and other problems and furnish the same to the government.

The project management unit will serve as head office under a director, deputy director and accounting staff, will evaluate the performance of the divisional and district level monitors.

The IMU will start functioning by March-end. Staff recruitment has been completed. The move will identify problems hampering the working of health facilities and issues, which affect patients` care at the facilitylevel.

Sources told Dawn that the government designed the programme last year after it collected data about number of facilities and staff in theprovince but only 20 per cent patients visited the public sector`s facilities to seek treatment.

The province has more than 1,600 government-run health facilities where 63,300 employees are worlcing to provide services to the people.

Each district had a network of facilities such as basic health unit, civil hospital, rural health centres, dispensaries, tehsil and district headquarters hospitals but the services weren`t up to the mark due to which the people didn`t visit them, sources said.

They said that owing lack of monitoring system, the people were not benefited from the huge infrastructure to a desired level.

The project entitled `Access to services, availability of staff and improving quality of services`, will operate through dashboard system where data from anywhere in the provincewill be displayed to the high-ranking officials. DFID`s technical resource facility has developed software for the programme.

The monitors with checklists on their mobile will conduct daily visits of the facilities where they will check indicators already listed on their mobile phones and will send the data to PMU. The monitors will check availability of staff, medicines, water and electricity and cleanliness etc at the facility which they visit and would also inform authorities about the number of patients, staff and resources there.

It will also enable the government to take evidence-based decisions to make full utilisation of the health facilities for the patients` care.

Through the system, the government will also come to know about the f acilities and their performance.