Most of the country’s public health infrastructure are not in a very good state of repair which has consequently caused stoppage of services on and off, Ministry of Health, Prof. Oathokwa Nkomazana has admitted.
Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) this week, Nkomazana noted that both the state of infrastructure, unavailability of right equipment and shortages of requisite personnel has significantly challenged the ministry’s ability to provide the quality of life to Batswana. She also added that inadequate financial provision is also exacerbating these challenges.
“One of our strategies is to optimise specialised health care and part of it is to ensure that our theatres are working to be able to deal with backlog but we are currently challenged primarily because we do not have adequate financial provision to actually do the renovations,” the permanent secretary told the committee.
She acknowledged that even in past when the ministry had some financial provisions, they were still not always efficient in making sure that renovations are done timely and at the right cost.
Nkomazana further admitted that the ministry, to a larger extend used to have no maintenance plans to ensure that they didn’t only have reactive maintenance. Though the ministry has now developed the maintenance plans, the permanent secretary indicated that they are still challenged by resources.
“The ministry has now developed maintenance plans that is however currently challenged by resources but we have plans to ensure how best our facilities are functioning optimally at all cost,” she said.
Meanwhile, Nkomazana has revealed that one of the ministry’s priorities is to re-engineer their processes as majority of the challenges or things that have not been done are because of the inefficiencies in their processes.
Updating on the availability of medicines, Nkomazana said the aim to have all medicines available at 90% has been significantly challenged in recent years.
“The covid 19 pandemic has significantly affected availability of medicines globally but by 2023 we started to recover and the availability has even surpassed 80%. However, we started to see that the availability of medicines is starting to plumb at significantly and that is primarily because we have not been able to pay the people who supply us with medicine because of economic challenges,”
The permanent secretary added that even when they do have a budget, it has been challenging to pay the suppliers because all their medicines are sold in hard currency.
“Initially we had always wanted to at least have six months supply but at the moment, the number of our medicines even when they are at 70%, we are talking about three months supply instead of the six months supply and that gives us enough buffer to do the procurements.”
Nkomazana noted that the ministry has tried to stabilise the provisions of medicines by giving framework contracts so that they already people who they have engaged to supply them with medicines. “Though this should really work well is currently challenged by the fact that some of these are owed significant amount of money.”
