(Last Updated on November 11, 2020 by GERALD NCUBE)
ZIMBABWE – The Ministry of Health and Child Care has kick-started the process of developing the National Health Strategy 2021-2025 (NHS) which would outline the roadmap towards turning around and restoring stability in the country’s health system.
To this end, yesterday the Ministry commenced a four-day Integrated Results Based Management (IRBM) Strategic Planning workshop in Mutare.
Officially opening the workshop, the Deputy Minister of Health and Child Care, Dr John Mangwiro, reiterated Government’s commitment to improving the quality of the country’s heath care delivery system.
“The Government is poised to ensure universal health coverage and major reforms were inevitable.
These reforms were and are designed to ensure efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and integrity of the health service delivery” said Dr Mangwiro.
The Deputy Minister pointed out that ten strategic focus areas had been identified by the Ministry as priority areas for the health sector for the period 2021 to 2025.
He implored workshop participants, drawn mostly from the Ministry’s top management, to stand guided by these areas in their deliberations which would strengthen the Ministry’s Strategic Plan.
The ten strategic focus areas are characterized by the attainment of key outcomes enunciated in the National Development Strategy (NDS) including;
• improved access to essential medicines and commodities;
• increased access to water, sanitation and healthy environment;
• improved health infrastructure and medical equipment for Health Service Delivery;
• improved governance of the Health Service;
• improved health sector human resources performance;
• increased domestic funding for health;
• reduced morbidity and mortality due to communicable and non-communicable diseases;
• improved reproductive, maternal, new-born child and adolescent health and nutrition;
• improved public health surveillance and disaster preparedness and response; and
• improved primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and quinary care;
Dr Mangwiro highlighted the need to streamline the NHS 2021-2025 with the recent restructuring of the Ministry which he said was the result of deep analysis of the previous structure in relation to the desire to achieve a stable health environment as a key social pillar of vision 2030.
“Major gaps were identified, and the conclusion was an old structure with incoherent structure.
“It was in this regard that Government saw it fit to allow for the restructuring of the Ministry of Health and Child Care” he said.