Balochistan Point Voice of Nation
By: Muhammad Jahangir Zehri
PPHI – Balochistan, a pilot project initially started in 03 Districts of the Province namely Quetta, Pishin & Mastung through a public private partnership between Government of Balochistan & Balochistan Rural Support Program (BRSP) with objectives to serve the poor masses in terms of primary healthcare facilities at their door step.
PPHI is registered on August 26, 2013 under section 42 of Companies Ordinance 1984. The agreement was signed between the Govt. of Balochistan and PPHI on October 4, 2013. PPHI has its own Board of Directors chaired by Mrs. Rubina Irfan Karim. Currently it’s operational throughout the province of Balochistan in 32 – districts with 693 – Basic Health Units.
PPHI – Balochistan’s monitoring and evaluation system was established to play the crucial role in assessing the wide, diverse range of interventions being implemented throughout the far flung areas & scattered catchment population of the province as a whole. All the monitoring teams with pulled socks make efforts to enhance the health quality of the poor masses and encourage them to visit health facilities on their convenience to mitigate the risk of being vulnerable to any disease. In organizational program, M&E is a tool for identifying/ documenting the success of the programs and tracking progress toward common indicators across healthcare Services. PPHI – Balochistan’s monitoring and evaluation system forms the basis of strengthening the understanding around the many multi-layered factors, underlying issues confronted during the implementation of a previously developed action plan and the effectiveness of the response at the service provider, community & catchment level. This mechanism allows for changes in project implementations i.e. adaptive management. The M & E guide puts emphasis on monitoring progress towards desired results including impact, building up on the concept of Results Based Management.
PPHI– Balochistan being engaged in delivery of Primary Health Care Services to the poor masses at Basic Health Unit level since 2006 has a proper monitoring and evaluation system, targets are set for a specific time period and calculation of %age of achievements against these set targets are made quarterly and shared as per District ratings according to the percentage achieved. In order to measure the performance of District Support Units of PPHI regarding provision of PHC services in Health Facilities the head office has conveyed some set targets in major indicators of PHC services to the DSUs which includes; Preventive Care, Curative Care, Immunization, MCH, Monitoring, Supervision & Reporting. Keeping in view the performance indicators the district teams with provided resources chalk out their own supervision plans & implement throughout the district for the achievement of the set targets.
The organization acknowledges as well as makes others realize that M & E is the responsibility of all involved in the program implementation, management & enhancement of primary healthcare structure in the province. Monitoring activities will be considered as a routine job of the implementation process where all stakeholders including District Support Managers (DSMs) M&E Officers, Social Organizers & support Group members to ensure their due contribution in order to benefit for future learning and improving healthcare in general & program quality in particular.
The author is District Monitoring & Evaluation Officer PPHI – Balochistan in Kalat.
Published in The Balochistan Point on May 1, 2019
