Panelists: Aisha Ijaz, Dr. Aneel Tariq, Dr. Ayaz Qureshi, Dr. Faisal Bashir Chaudry, Dr. Sara Saeed Khurram and Dr. Ayesha Masood
Where: Live on SWGI Facebook

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility and precarity of health systems across the world. Decades of privatisation, divestment and underfunding in the health sector by the state has left the health system often stretched beyond its capacity and barely able to care for those who needed it the most. The pandemic in more than one way has made us confront this on-going collapse. And yet, perhaps this very breakdown is the cause for new hope. The COVID-19 pandemic has allowed us to appreciate the real limits and fragility of all the social, technological, and material worlds we inhabit, and to recognise that the old orders may well and truly be in the process of coming apart.

In this panel, we focus on the vulnerabilities inherent within Pakistan’s health system and take the opportunity to engage in a generative and productive process: an occasion to imagine and create new orders and new systems premised on equity and sustainability. Therefore, we want to focus on how people, alone or together, overcome the hurdles created by the pandemic, build new solutions or tinker with the old ones to make them work. Our aim then is to consider the steps towards rethinking the way Pakistan, and the world, approaches care.