Avail more funds to Health Ministry, Govt urged

GOVERNMENT should consider increasing funding to public health institutions that face financial challenges to enable them offer satisfactory service to patients, Chinhoyi Provincial Medical Superintendent Dr Collet Mawire has said.

The Ministry of Health and Child Care was this year allocated 5,84 percent of the National Budget, down from about six percent in 2017.

This goes against the Abuja Declaration, which states that 15 percent of national budget should be allocated to the health sector.

In an interview last week, Dr Mawire appealed for urgent Government intervention over the issue.

“As Chinhoyi Provincial Hospital, we are carrying to the fullest the instruction from Government ordering us to offer free services to children below the age of five and every citizen above 65 years,” he said.

“However, the challenge is that our resources have not improved. Therefore, the tendency is that resources quickly get exhausted.”

Dr Mawire said patients were taking advantage of the new dispensation, but did not accept that sometimes health institutions run short of drugs.

“We are having challenges with trying to explain to patients that sometimes due to the increase of numbers of people being attended to we might run out of drugs,” he said.

Dr Mawire bemoaned the collapse of the referral systems, leading to excessive number of patients going directly to referral centres.

“The primary health mechanism countrywide should be strengthened, while we also need to improve accessibility to these institutions to reduce the number of outpatients at referral centres,” he said.