HIV/Aids groups praise mini budget
FRIDAY OCTOBER 28 2016 THE STOP Stock Outs (SSP) project has welcomed the mid-term budget announcement that Treasury will be increasing the annual allocation of resources to health by 8 percent per year, citing this will bolster the move to treat patients immediately after they test positive for HIV.
This week, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan announced the government would increase its spending, mainly to support the expansion of the HIV/Aids programme, in particular free antiretroviral treatment which now reaches 3.5 million people.
Treasury said the public health sector, which now accounts for 12percent of public expenditure, had made significant savings with lower pharmaceutical costs as a result of centralised tendering, market intelligence, medicine stock surveillance and new distribution systems.
During his budget speech in May, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi announced Treasury had allocated an extra R1billion to finance the “universal test and treat” programme, which started last month.The total health budget for 2016/17 is R183.6bn.
Susan Tafeni, project manager for SSP, a consortium comprised of lobby groups such as Section 27, MSF, Treatment Action Campaign, Rural Doctors Association of SA and SA HIV Clinician’s Society among others, said the project hoped the budget increase would also help to “iron out the stock monitoring and supply chain problems”.
The SSP project monitors access to essential potentially lifesaving medicines in public health facilities across South Africa, reporting back to government and making recommendations on overcoming the issues raised.
She commended the progress of a nationwide programme to monitor stock outs, which is known as the Stock Visibility System, which was rolled out two years ago to identify potential stock outs and address them in time to meet patient needs.
She, however, raised concerns about reporting levels of many provinces, saying these were “low and data is consequently not reliable which hampers adequate delivery to some places”.