Speaking at the opening of the second biannual meeting of the Sector Coordination Committee, which brings together senior Health Ministry officials and representatives of the donors who support the health service, Garrido added that the government intends to improve community participation in running health units through grass roots councils, tasked with ensuring the correct implementation of Mozambique's primary health care policy.
He told the meeting that involving the community in promoting its own health and preventing disease is an essential condition for implementing this policy.
The meeting is due to look at progress in the health component, budgeted at 60 million US dollars, of the government's Economic and Social Plan for 2007, the draft Economic and Social Plan for 2008, and the strategic plan for the health sector for the period 2007-2012.
Garrido stressed that the availability of trained staff was a key issue for the health service. An Accelerated Training Plan is now in its second year, with 47 additional courses underway.
In 2008, 1,700 people would graduate from the health training institutes, 400 of them from the Accelerated Training Plan.
But there was still a very long path to travel. Mozambique has one doctor for more than 30,000 inhabitants and one nurse per 3,000 inhabitants: Garrido pointed out that the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends a ratio of one doctor per 1,000 inhabitants and one nurse for less than 1,000.
Training in itself, however, was of little use unless the people trained stayed in the health service and in the country.
So the Health Ministry was now studying ways to keep trained staff within the health service. European Union representative Douglas Hamilton, speaking on behalf of the donors, said that the new health strategic plan was a great improvement on the previous one because "it defines costs, which implies that it will be easier to determine the total need in resources for the sector in the medium term".
Hamilton stressed the importance of the Performance Assessment Table in the government's Economic and Social Plan.
For donor commitment in the future would depend on performance this year. The Assessment Table included indicators and targets, and "our commitment to the state budget is inherently linked to the general understanding that these targets have to be met by the end of the year".
Compliance, or non-compliance, with the targets would determine continued budget support, in the future.
"The intention of monitoring performance", he added, was to "guarantee adequate quality, effectiveness and efficiency in providing health services".
Donors were also concerned about financial management in the Health Ministry. Hamilton declared that "coordination between key procurement departments and the department responsible for budget execution and financial control needs to be improved".
This year there had been problems in "the availability and allocation of funds in the Health Ministry which can be expected to lead to consequences in terms of the provision of services", Hamilton warned. "It is essential that implementation of the plan to strengthen the Ministry's Administration and Finance Department significantly improves financial management in the entire sector and that we begin to see improvement in the 2007 audit report", he added.
SOURCE: AIM
