Spotlight on Sindh Health Sector Budget

Abstract

The 18 th Constitutional Amendment was passed in April 2010 by ruling party of that time Pakistan people's party in support of the opposition party with the aim of providing more autonomy to the provincial governments. Abolishing 17 ministries at federal level and transferring the responsibilities to provinces. It has provided new prospect to provincial governments to review and revise administrative, personnel, management and financial resources to narrow down the wide existing gaps and plan for additional responsibilities. This analysis was entirely based on secondary data. Secondary data were selected randomly without using any specific search strategy, however the focused was post devolution trend analysis of health sector budget allocation. Several government documents/reports were a part of this analysis. Nominal values were used in all these analyses using descriptive approach for analysing the trend. The review article emphasized more on Sindh province. It is evident from the statistics that there has been no change in health indicators over the year's despite of 5-6 fold increase in budget allocation to health sector. Provincial government need to prioritize budget allocation within sector from non-developmental to developmental, also a shift from curative to preventive programs. In addition, government need to provide some sort of financial cushions like insurance, health vouchers to reduce the out of pocket expenditure.