PTCL and Ufone have launched a nationwide mental health initiative on Mother’s Day 2026, partnering with Oladoc, Pakistan’s leading digital health platform, to make free consultations with certified psychiatrists available to mothers across the country through the UPTCL application. The initiative, titled MoreSupportForMothers, is described as the first of its kind in Pakistan’s telecom industry, pairing awareness with action to address a maternal mental health crisis that has remained one of the country’s most widespread and least addressed public health challenges.
Postpartum depression affects an estimated 40 percent of Pakistani mothers, a rate up to four times the global average and among the highest in all of Asia. Pakistan has only 0.19 psychiatrists per 100,000 people, allocates just 0.4 percent of its national health budget to mental health, and nine out of ten people who need mental health support in the country receive none. For new mothers in smaller cities, rural districts, and remote communities, where the additional barriers of distance, mobility limitations, and deep-rooted social stigma compound the challenge, access to qualified professional support has remained largely out of reach. The UPTCL app now offers free mental health consultations with certified psychiatrists, requiring no clinic visit, no commute, no waiting room, and no prior diagnosis or referral, with the service available from wherever a mother happens to be, whether in interior Sindh, a city apartment, or a remote community in Gilgit.
PTCL and Ufone’s partnership with Oladoc brings together Pakistan’s largest telecom infrastructure and its most trusted digital health platform to deliver scale that the country’s maternal mental health landscape has never had before. Oladoc connects patients with thousands of verified healthcare professionals across specialties, and through this partnership its network of certified psychiatrists is now accessible, for free, to every mother in Pakistan who downloads the UPTCL app, available on both iOS and Android. The service is not limited to major urban centres but is designed to reach across every province and district, leveraging PTCL and Ufone’s nationwide network coverage to extend professional mental health support to communities that would otherwise have no realistic pathway to care. PTCL Group has positioned the MoreSupportForMothers campaign not as a one-day activation but as a statement of organisational intent, reflecting its view that its role extends beyond networks and into the lives of the people those networks serve.
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