The Statistic Division/Federal Bureau of Statistics (FBS) in collaboration with World Health Organisation (WHO) and GTZ held a workshop on "National Health Accounts of Pakistan" at a local hotel on Saturday. Speaking on the occasion, Secretary, Statistics Division Tariq Shafiq Khan said that NHA was first ever exercise carried out in Pakistan and the results of this exercise would enable Pakistan to have comparison of performance of health sector with other countries.
It is a standard set of matrices deals with the estimation of expenditure on health (both in public and private sector) and is a policy tool for improving the capacity of health sector planners to manage their health systems, he added. He said that international comparisons of health sector performance and health expenditures are now quite common and WHO is putting a lot of efforts on enabling these comparisons.
According to WHO figures, the picture for Pakistan was not encouraging, to address this issue, FBS, initiated the task of developing the NHA for Pakistan, he said. "With the help of NHA we have now reviewed this position and made strides to put more light on it," Shafiq Khan added. He said that like National Accounts, the NHA is a sensitive exercise and would need special attention.
"We will, therefore, have to handle the production of this accounting framework and the publication of the results in a professional manner," he said. Almost two years ago, it was decided that the compilation of health accounts statistics should be housed in FBS and it took the challenge and has completed the first round of NHA.
The secretary appreciated the contribution of GTZ and WHO in organising this workshop and hoped that deliberations of this august gathering will come up with a useful as well as workable recommendations which would help for the establishment of national health accounting system for Pakistan. The participants also discussed different feature of the NHA and shared knowledge about the approach, results, problems and possible solutions. Representatives of WHO, Provincial Health Department, NGOs and mediamen participated in the workshop.