Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
In response to the COVID pandemic, concerted efforts were made by provincial and federal governments to invest in critical care infrastructure and medical equipment to bridge the gap of resource-limitation in intensive care units ICUs across Pakistan. To assess the baseline critical care capacity of Pakistan, we conducted a series of cross-sectional surveys of hospitals providing COVID care across the country.
Surveys were administered via telephonic and on-site interviews and based on a unique checklist for assessing critical care units which was created from the Partners in Health 4S Framework, which is: Space, Staff, Stuff, and Systems.
These components were scored, weighted equally, and then ranked into quartiles. A total of hospitals were surveyed, with the majority being in the public sector We found infrastructure, staffing, and systems lacking as only Merely Almost all ranks showed significant disparity between public—private and metropolitan—rural settings, with private and metropolitan hospitals having a greater proportion in the 1st rank, while public and rural hospitals had a greater proportion in the lower ranks.
Pakistan has an underdeveloped critical care network with significant inequity between public—private and metropolitan—rural strata. We hope for future resource allocation and capacity development projects for critical care in order to reduce these disparities.
