The Christian Health Association of Malawi (Cham) has asked government to settle its debts with its facilities before a five-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed last week in Lilongwe, becomes operational.<\/p>\n
The MoU becomes effective on July 1, 2016.<\/p>\n
According to Cham, government, which is apparently failing not only to feed its starved population but to stock its health facilities with enough drugs, owes Cham facilities about K400 million.<\/p>\n
In an interview recently, one of Cham\u2019s board members, Gautoni Kainja, said he expects the money to be paid before the new MoU comes into effect.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Minister of Health has assured us and the Chief of Health Services has explained that there is funding which has been given to government to settle those arrears. So, if government doesn\u2019t pay, it will be surprising. What will they use that money for? We are, however, confident that the arrears will be paid before the MoU becomes effective,\u201d Kainja said.<\/p>\n
Cham currently operates 180 health facilities and 12 training colleges that provide about 37 percent of health care and trains up to 80 percent of health workers in Malawi.<\/p>\n
Responding to The Daily Times <\/em>inquiries, Minister of Health, Peter Kumpalume, however, said government is already paying the arrears.<\/p>\n \u201cThey may not be aware of the current standing. In January this year, I gave instructions that everybody that we owe money should be paid by 31st January [2016]. Obviously, there were few hiccups around there but by 15th February [2016], all the paperwork in the Ministry was cleared. Before we can make the payment, auditors have to check if everything is in order and it was found that in some facilities not all paperwork was in order,\u201d Kumpalume said.<\/p>\n He said government has already informed the facilities what needs to be done.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Ministry was under obligation to write them what exactly was outstanding in terms of paperwork. We hope that before the end of this month, as long as their paperwork is delivered to the Ministry and it is complete, there are no outstanding issues in the paperwork, I am positive all the outstanding payments will be made,\u201d Kumpalume said.<\/p>\n Key areas in the newly-launched MoU include personal emoluments, provision of health services, human resource development and infrastructure for health service delivery and training.<\/p>\n On personal emoluments, government, through Cham secretariat, will, among others, pay salaries, leave grants, and pension scheme contributions.<\/p>\n Government will also provide financial, technical or other requisite support, to enable Cham secretariat effectively manage its human resource.<\/p>\n Cham is, among others, expected to ensure that Cham unit staff, covered under the MoU, have unique payroll identification numbers.<\/p>\n \u201cAnnual allocation for Service Level Agreement will be based on ceilings allocated to Service Level Agreement and will be voted for in Parliament as part of Other Recurrent Transactions Budget. The two parties will agree on the reimbursement mechanism for paying service Level Agreement taking into account salary grants\u2026,\u201d read details of government\u2019s obligation under provision of health services.<\/p>\n The MoU will only apply to all Cham units providing primary health care outside eight-kilometre radius of a non-paying facility and are duly registered with the Medical Council of Malawi.<\/p>\n The MoU also includes all Cham units providing complimentary secondary and tertiary care and all Cham training institutions duly accredited by regulatory bodies to provide training in various disciplines of the health workforce<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Christian Health Association of Malawi (Cham) has asked government to settle its debts with its facilities before a five-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed last week in Lilongwe, becomes operational. The MoU becomes effective on July 1, 2016. According to Cham, government, which is apparently failing not only to feed its starved population but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20788,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20787"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20789,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20787\/revisions\/20789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}