FPHC Contine Pakistan Flood Relief

Since late July, 2010 more than 10 million children have been affected by the Pakistan floods, including 2.8 million under five-year-olds. 1.2 million people still live in 6300 camps all across the country many in KPK.

Although progress is being made, many flood-affected families still have limited access to health facilities. In some areas, service delivery has been totally disrupted as up to 80% of the homes and facilities were affected. With

more than 200 health units destroyed completely or only partially functional, attention has now turned to repairing them.

The majority of private sector health providers in the area have also been disrupted by the floods. Luckily, most of Frontier Primary Health Care health units remained functional so they have been able to assist in areas where facilities have been destroyed.

Surveillance information from the affected flood areas of Pakistan is available on the WHO site. http://www.who.int/hac/crises/pak/en/index.html

In summary in the four districts of KPK, Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan a total of 80 health facilities were affrected, almost half (38) of them in KPK (Northwest Frontier Province). WHO has 20 health partners assisting in the flood relief in KPK including Frontier Primary Health Care, which is active in both nutrition and health in flood affected areas in Mardan district and a refugee camp.

So far it has proved difficult to track activities of FPHC on the WHO website, which better captures activities of the large international organizations likely due to their better access to the internet. It was not possible, for example, to identify any of the FPHC health centers on the WHO maps which detailed health facilitiy status following the flood nor was FPHC mentioned as a partner in earlier WHO documents despite the fact that their daily medical contacts exceed that of many of the other organizations that are mentioned and despite the fact that they were in the field earlier than most of the other partner organizations.

However, in early Sept, 14 staff from the Frontier Primary Health Care (FPHC) mobile health teams were trained on the WHO Disease Early Warning System so hopefully their activities will be better tracked now.

The efforts of FPHC continue in assisting provision of emergency health assistance including high impact, critical life-saving services for men, women and children in communities of flood-affected areas of Mardan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa through strengthening, providing and maintaining essential health services.

We have managed to send more than $8000 in flood relief to FPHC to date through Rose Charities. As many other organizations are now finding, direct contributions to effective local groups with a known, trusted reputation in the field appear one of the most cost-effective ways to assist.

Several large international organizations such as Hesperian, the distributors of Where There is No Doctor and Grassroots International are also recommending this approach. A wonderful side effect of this process is that local know-how and expertise in responding to such crises also increases.

It appears that Astarte, a grassroots organization linked to John Snow International at Johns Hopkins University is also raising funds for FPHC as is a Malaysian NGO called Campioning Sara.

A very big thank you to all our generous contributors and hard working volunteers, who make this kind of support possible.

Photos: FPHC Flood relief 2010