Before you start

Private health insurance, arranged before arrival
Passport and visa for hospital registration
Vaccination records, including for school entry
A household heat plan by April and air purifiers by October

Step-by-step

1
Buy insurance before you arrive
Expatriate policies underwrite at purchase, so conditions declared later become exclusions. Check the evacuation benefit, but check the domestic referral pathway too — from Multan the realistic escalation for many conditions is Lahore, four hours up the M-4, rather than an international flight.
OnlineWho: YouBefore arrival
2
Register at a hospital and know the Nishtar emergency route
Nishtar is the large public tertiary centre with a busy emergency department; the private hospitals along Bosan Road and in the Cantt are where most professionals go first for routine care. Register before you need to, and know which is closest to home — Multan is spread out and summer afternoons make any journey harder than the map suggests.
In personWho: YouMonth 1
3
Build a heat plan before May, and include your household staff
Above 45°C, heat exhaustion and heatstroke are the practical risk and they arrive faster than people expect. Shift outdoor work to early morning, keep oral rehydration salts in the house, know the signs, and make sure anyone working for you — drivers, guards, domestic staff — has shade, water and permission to stop. This is the single most consequential health measure in Multan and it costs nothing.
In personWho: YouBy April
4
Buy purifiers and masks in October
South Punjab gets the same smog season as the rest of the province and Multan has recorded some of the worst readings anywhere in the world during the worst episodes. HEPA purifiers sized for the bedrooms and your work room, plus properly fitted respirator masks rather than surgical ones, need buying before the season starts and the stock disappears.
OnlineWho: YouBy October
5
Programme Rescue 1122 and Edhi 115
The Punjab Emergency Service runs ambulance, fire and rescue on 1122 across every Punjab district with a published average response under eight minutes, and Multan gets the full service. Edhi's charitable ambulances on 115 are the other number to hold. Punjab also runs a 1033 health helpline.
In personWho: You
6
Check your own district's health card position rather than assuming
Punjab's health card programme has been narrowed, restored and re-scoped repeatedly, and eligibility is not uniform across the province. None of it applies to foreign nationals, but if you employ household staff it determines what happens when one of them is admitted, and that is worth knowing before rather than during.
OnlineWho: You

Documents you’ll need

Insurance policy and card
Passport and visa
Vaccination records
Prior medical records and a generic-name prescription list
Employer group scheme details, if applicable

Things most newcomers don’t know

Multan has two health seasons and both are on the calendar months in advance.

Summer here runs above 45°C for extended stretches in one of the hottest inhabited belts in South Asia, and heat illness is a documented seasonal load on the emergency departments rather than an abstract risk. Winter brings the Punjab smog season, and Multan has appeared among the worst air quality readings recorded anywhere during the worst episodes. Neither is a surprise, which is the point: the household measures that matter — cooling, hydration, shade for outdoor staff, purifiers, sealed rooms — all have to be in place before the season rather than during it.

Source: Punjab AQI dashboard; community-reported

Nishtar's catchment is far larger than the city, which cuts both ways.

Nishtar Hospital, founded in 1951 and attached to Nishtar Medical University, is the tertiary referral centre for the whole of south Punjab and takes patients from beyond it. The upside is that specialist expertise here is deeper than a city of 2.2 million would otherwise support. The downside is volume: the emergency department serves a region rather than a city, and waiting reflects that. For anything non-urgent, book privately; for anything genuinely urgent, Nishtar is where you want to be.

Source: community-reported

The province publishes its own hourly air quality data, and Multan is on it.

Punjab runs a public AQI dashboard covering more than thirty districts with hourly station readings, forecasts, monthly trends and separate health advisories for the general public and for vulnerable groups, plus a daily city ranking. It is the province's own monitoring network rather than a crowd-sourced sensor mesh. Use it to decide about outdoor exercise, school runs and whether to open the windows, rather than judging from the sky — on the worst days the sky is not a useful guide.

Source: Punjab AQI dashboard

Punjab's health card is not the universal scheme Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's is.

KP's Sehat Card Plus covers every family in that province — more than 10.6 million — for free inpatient care up to PKR 1 million a year. Punjab's published eligibility is narrower and geographically uneven, and its scope has been changed more than once in recent years. Foreign nationals are outside both regardless. The reason to know the current Punjab position is domestic staff: whether the person who works in your house has cover, and what happens if they are admitted, is a question worth answering before it arises.

Source: Punjab Health and Population Department

Common mistakes to avoid

Treating Multan's summer as Lahore's summer with a few extra degrees.
Not making a heat plan that covers drivers, guards and domestic staff.
Arriving in November without air purifiers already bought.
Assuming a government health card scheme covers you — none of them cover foreign nationals.
Buying evacuation-heavy cover without checking the domestic referral pathway to Lahore.

Some of this may be out of date. Spotted something inaccurate? Help us keep it right for the next newcomer.