Since 2016, the IHR-SP in Pakistan has been providing technical and logistical support to national and provincial public health reference labs to develop linkages to strengthen diagnostic testing, reference testing and disease surveillance. In November 2023, the IHR-SP in collaboration with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) provincial health department hosted a one day meeting of provincial and regional public health reference labs. The objective of the meeting was to discuss the status and functions of public health labs with special focus on testing capacity, human resource, budget, technical capacity along with challenges and opportunities to strengthen Integrated Disease Surveillance & Response (IDSR) in the province.

Image 1: The Director General Health Services, KP, the Director PPHRL and our UKHSA in-country advisor chairing the meeting session 

The meeting was chaired by the Director General Health Services, KP and co-chaired by the Director Provincial Public Health Reference Laboratory (PPHRL) with technical support from IHR-SP in-country advisors. The Director of PPHRL highlighted the progress the labs had made since its inception in terms of pathogen testing capacity, list of priority pathogens, genome sequencing, quality assurance schemes and labs information & management systems. He also shared the current challenges of PPHRL in terms of resources (human and financial). One by one, the regional labs also mentioned their current functions and updated the forum on status of current problems threatening to hault the progress of regional labs.

After the discussions, the action points were compiled in three thematic areas. The first related to governance, and the action point agreed was to engage all labs through official notifications by the health department. The second area was sustainability, and the action point was to initiate a regular commissioning process to secure the funding of PPHRL and regional labs from the health and finance department. The final area was around lab information systems - to explore and finalise the digital platform to establish functional and integrated lab information and management systems.

The IHR-SP will work with provinical health department and provincial public health reference labs to initiate the lab assessments process to identify the specific needs of each lab. The IHR-SP IT subject matter expert and in-country team will also support the public health reference labs to establish a Labs Information & Management System (LIMS). 

Image 2: UKHSA in-country advisor resonating the UKHSA support to health department and PPHRL to strengthen IDSR in the province  

Syed Wasif Javed