Pharmacists hold conference, urge Treasury to raise funding to healthcare

NAIROBI, KENYA: Pharmacists are asking the Treasury to raise funding to the health sector in the next financial year.

They said an increase from 6 per cent to at least 15 per cent in allocations will allow counties to get enough resources to fund devolved health functions.

Speaking in Mombasa at the annual conference of the Pharmaceutical Society of Kenya (PSK), the medics said scaling up the health budget will ensure a healthy economy since more Kenyans would access quality services.

While there has been outrage over calls by Parliament's Committee on Implementation that county governments cede all their health functions to the national government, the pharmacists said problems in the sector are about limited funding.

PSK President Paul Mwaniki said the current 6 per cent budget allocation to the sector is way below the 15 per cent agreed upon by African governments under the 2001 Abuja Declaration.

“We urge President Uhuru Kenyatta to ensure there is a tremendous increase in allocations to health to 15 per cent in the next financial year,” Dr Mwaniki said.

He added that county government should also harness local resources to ensure hospitals are well equipped with equipment and human resources.

“The county governments must also use local resources to fund health programmes. If this is done and managed efficiently, it will assure a health nation and a healthy economy,” Mwaniki told the conference.

He said the national government and the counties should collaborate to ensure the public gets unlimited access to safe and efficacious medicines and other health products.

“While we recognise there is some improvement in the public healthcare services in the counties in the last few months compared to the first year of devolution where healthcare in the counties was almost grounding to a halt, we believe more should be done,” he said.

At the same time, the PSK boss said the government should build the capacity of regulatory agencies to ensure safety, law and order in the health sector. All the regulatory bodies in health sector, he added, have limited capacity to regulate the sector.

“We urge Health Cabinet Secretary James Macharia to do a proper audit of the capacity of the regulatory boards. Regulation and quality assurance must be enforced in both private and public facilities. It is regrettable most public facilities cannot pass basic quality assessments,” he said.

He said PSK had come up with the green-cross branding, an accreditation mechanism that helps the public identify accredited identify pharmaceutical outlets.