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Legislative reforms of the blood transfusion system in Pakistan
Author(s) -
Zaheer H. A.,
Waheed U.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
transfusion medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.471
H-Index - 59
eISSN - 1365-3148
pISSN - 0958-7578
DOI - 10.1111/tme.12107
Subject(s) - government (linguistics) , legislature , blood transfusion , medicine , citation , library science , political science , surgery , law , computer science , philosophy , linguistics
Dear Sir, The member states of the World Health Organization have committed to promote blood safety in their respective countries through a number of World Health Assembly resolutions passed since 1975 (WHA, 1975). The implementation of this commitment is a major challenge for many developing countries. A major constraint in this regard is often the absence of national policies, poor healthcare service delivery structures and governance issues. As the legal and regulatory framework is the cornerstone of blood safety, without comprehensive blood safety legislation, improvements in access and quality of services will remain a testing challenge. As a result, the blood programmes in the developing countries strive to achieve the objective of universal blood safety through systems reform involving development or review and revision of the existing legal and regulatory frameworks. With a population of 180 million, Pakistan is the world’s sixth most populated country. Healthcare coverage is not comprehensive and plagued with financial and management constraints. The public sector healthcare system operates through a three-tier delivery structure and a variety of public health interventions. The role of private sector is growing and according to one estimate, its share has reached 75% (Nishtar, 2006). Weaknesses in the overall healthcare system include lack of adequate regulatory framework in addition to weak implementation. The public health system is deficient in terms of human and physical infrastructure to match the needs of the growing population and the challenges faced by natural and man-made disasters occurring with increasing frequency in the recent past. In addition, as a result of the introduction of the long delayed constitutional amendments, the subject of health has been devolved to the provinces where there is limited capacity to cope with the technical and administrative issues of the transition phase. Currently, the blood transfusion services in Pakistan are fragmented with insufficient regulatory oversight. As a result, there exist suboptimal standards for donor selection, inadequate practices for manufacturing, laboratory testing, storage, transport and transfusion and compromise the donor and patient safety. There is limited interaction among the more than 1830 service providers functioning in the public, private and NGO sector in the country (Zaheer et al., 2012).The heterogeneous state of affairs makes provision of quality service to the large population