R200m for Aids prevention
Shaun Benton
7 June 2006
The South African government has allocated R200-million over the next two years to an intensified communication and social mobilisation campaign aimed at cutting down new HIV infections in the country.
Delivering her department's budget speech in Parliament in Cape Town on Tuesday, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said the campaign would seek to "improve the abstinence component of prevention, support the distribution of female condoms, and seek to sustain the very impressive condom distribution rate, which currently averages 350 million free male condoms per year."
South Africa's comprehensive HIV/Aids management, care and treatment plan would also be strengthened, the minister said, through:
- strengthening the health system;
- safe administration and monitoring of anti-retroviral therapy;
- increasing access to voluntary counselling and testing;
- preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV;
- promoting human
rights and access to care and support services;
- promoting good nutrition; and
- research and development of African traditional medicines.
Last month, government spokesperson Joel Netshitenzhe said that South Africa now had the world's largest anti-retroviral treatment scheme, with more than 210 000 people on antiretroviral drug combination therapy in the country's public and private health sectors.
Public-private cooperation
Tshabalala-Msimang said the government was beginning to focus on closer cooperation with the country's advanced and well-resourced private health care sector.
A voluntary charter for the health sector was currently being negotiated "to provide a coherent framework for engagement between the public and private health sectors."
The charter, she said, was "an effort to deal with the inequities between the two sectors as well as the transformation of the private health sector," adding that her
department had started negotiating targets for broad-based black economic empowerment in equity ownership of the sector.
But of equal importance, the minister said, was "the need for sharing of resources, experiences and competencies between the two sectors in the manner that strengthens the entire health system."
Medicine prices
On the long-standing issue of medicine prices, Tshabalala-Msimang said the government was continuing with efforts to reduce the price of medicines in the country.
A new dispensing fee structure should be finalised soon following input from stakeholders to a draft dispensing fee structure published in March, she said.
This follows last year's Constitutional Court ruling that the government review the dispensing fee, that had been set at 26% of the single exit price capped at R26. Some pharmacists had argued that the regulation, if implemented, would have forced them out of business.
A pricing
committee "is also developing a methodology for international benchmarking which will bring medicine prices in South Africa in line with those of other countries," the minister said.
Keeping skilled professionals
On the issue of the "brain-drain" of skilled health professionals attracted by higher salaries abroad, Tshabalala-Msimang said an agreement with Britain, through which health workers can work in UK hospitals and return to SA's public sector without loss of employment or status, had started to show results.
"Since we signed the agreement in 2003, the number of South African nurses registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Council in UK has decreased by more than 55%, from 2 114 in 2002 to 933 in 2005," she said.
Similar agreements with other countries which host a significant number of South African trained professionals, such as Canada, are being explored.
Traditional African medicines
The
minister said her department would also focus on traditional African medicines this year, and planned to establish a Traditional Health Practitioners Council as provided for in the Traditional Health Practitioners Act.
An international workshop on traditional medicine being hosted by South Africa this week would "assist us to better understand the value and the use of traditional medicine and support the research and development of this important component of health," she said.
Tshabalala-Msimang also told Parliament that her focus on nutrition in the fight against HIV/Aids had been vindicated by international moves to support better nutrition as a basis for better health.
She said that a report tabled by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to the World Health Assembly two weeks ago had urged member states to integrate nutrition in their response plans.
She added that the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria "has urged that proposals for funding on
HIV/Aids should include a nutrition component."
Source: BuaNews
| 
