Minutes of a meeting that government officials and civil society organisations (CSOs) had two weeks ago show that the two parties have chosen to disagree on the introduction of user fees in district hospitals.<\/p>\n
While Ministry of Health officials and hospitals\u2019 directors present at the meeting supported the continued implementation of the system in central hospitals and extending the same to district hospitals this year, the CSOs insisted the system totally contradicts the country\u2019s commitments to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC).<\/p>\n
The meeting followed a statement which the CSOs released calling on government to end all payments for health services in public health facilities.<\/p>\n
But at a round table meeting the two sides held in Lilongwe, Chief of Health Services, Charles Mwansambo, said the CSOs\u2019 statement had errors and was made from an uninformed position.<\/p>\n
\u201cGovernment has always strived to achieve UHC as demonstrated by its strategic documents and Government-Cham service level agreement which stipulates that Cham facilities should provide free services for all services in certain areas where government facilities were very far away and selected services in other designated areas,\u201d the minutes we have seen quote Mwansambo.<\/p>\n
He also said the bypass fees were proposed by central hospitals as a way of screening out patients wondering why the CSOs were questioning this now as the fees and paying wings had been there for a long time.<\/p>\n
Mwansambo also faulted the CSOs study report as lacking evidence for some of the findings especially on quality of services between paying and non paying wings saying evidence showed that non-paying wings were more visited by doctors than paying wings.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt this point we would like to call upon CSOs and donors to work together to explore ways as to how the health sector could be better resourced in Malawi,\u201d Mwansambo said.<\/p>\n
However, CSOs maintain that the way forward would be for all stakeholders to explore better ways of raising funds for the health sector without pushing the burden on poor people.<\/p>\n
\u201c We feel introduction of these fees has created a two-tier system, where the poorest people will be left with the lowest quality of healthcare and the longest waiting time to access poor quality services, and such a system means that money will start to speak louder than Malawians\u2019 real health needs,\u201d said the CSOs in an earlier statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Minutes of a meeting that government officials and civil society organisations (CSOs) had two weeks ago show that the two parties have chosen to disagree on the introduction of user fees in district hospitals. While Ministry of Health officials and hospitals\u2019 directors present at the meeting supported the continued implementation of the system in central […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":21758,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26801","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\/26801","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=26801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26805,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26801\/revisions\/26805"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}