Hospitals across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are running on a medical workforce far too small for the people it serves. The province has just 8,024 doctors for a population of more than 40 million, roughly one doctor for every 5,000 to 6,000 people. For patients, that number is not an abstraction. It is the queue outside a crowded outpatient department and the long journey to a hospital that actually has a specialist.
The shortage of doctors is only one part of the picture. More than 200 government health facilities of different kinds are lying non-functional across the province. The gap in hospital beds is just as stark: public hospitals have 18,432 beds, while the population needs around 64,000, a shortfall of more than 45,000 beds and less than a third of the capacity required.
Far Below the Accepted Benchmark
Measured against the widely used benchmark of one doctor for every 1,000 people, the scale of the problem becomes clearer still. By that standard, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa would need around 40,000 doctors, roughly five times the number it has today, and every missing doctor adds to the load carried by those who remain.
The strain is not unique to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, but the province’s figures are among the sharpest illustrations of a national problem. Pakistan as a whole needs about 179,000 more doctors to meet demand, according to the Pakistan Medical Association. The country has around 340,780 registered medical practitioners, yet their distribution leaves large gaps, especially outside the big cities.
The pressure is felt most keenly in the smaller hospitals that serve towns and rural districts. Teaching hospitals in Pakistan have, on average, one doctor for every 1,300 people. At tehsil and district headquarters hospitals and basic health units, the figure falls to just 0.23 doctors for every 1,000 patients, so a patient arriving at a small public facility may find no doctor at all.
Beds tell the same story. A health system needs beds not only for emergencies but for surgery, childbirth and recovery. When more than 45,000 beds are missing, patients are turned away, kept waiting, or sent to hospitals hours from home, while the non-functional facilities that could treat them close to home stand idle.
What the Government Plans to Do
The provincial government has now set out steps it says will begin to close the gap. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Adviser Lt. Gen. (retd) Nigar Johar told a briefing that the government has decided to amend the Medical Teaching Institutions Act and to audit hospitals across the province, to establish exactly where the system is failing before further decisions are taken.
The Act governs how the province’s teaching hospitals are managed, including the powers of their boards and the way senior staff are appointed. Changing the law signals that the government believes the problem is not only about numbers but about how hospitals are organised, and an audit could show which facilities can be reopened quickly and where doctors are most urgently needed.
Johar also settled questions about the future of the Sehat Card, the health insurance scheme that has become one of the province’s best-known programmes. She said it will not be scrapped. Instead, its flaws will be fixed and the programme improved. The province recently decided to put the Sehat Card through a financial audit, to understand where the money is going before committing to its next phase.
The Sehat Card has a long history in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It began in December 2015 as the Sehat Sahulat Programme, covering four districts at first, and in April 2020 it was extended to every household in the province and renamed Sehat Card Plus. It offers cover of up to one million rupees per family per year for inpatient treatment, with more than seven million households enrolled. But a card that pays for treatment is only useful if there are doctors and beds available to provide it.
The government had earlier ordered fast-track work on new hospitals, and the latest figures show why that work cannot wait. New buildings alone will not solve the shortage, since a hospital without doctors is only a building, but more capacity is a necessary part of any answer. The province needs both: facilities that work, and the staff to run them.
Closing the gap of around 32,000 doctors and more than 45,000 beds will take years, not months. Training a doctor takes the best part of a decade, and keeping doctors in public hospitals, especially in smaller towns, means paying them properly and giving them the equipment and support to do their jobs. The amendment to the teaching institutions law and the hospital audit are a start, and the decision to keep the Sehat Card and fix it rather than abandon it gives patients some certainty. What will decide whether any of this changes life for patients is what follows: whether the audit leads to real decisions, whether non-functional facilities reopen, and whether new hospitals are staffed when they open.
