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Africa told to focus on rural health
Published on June 2, 2008, 12:00 am
By Ochieng’ Ogodo in Geneva
East African countries have been urged to ensure that health care systems reach rural communities if they hope to reduce diseases in the region.
Ugandan Vice-President, Prof Gilbert Balibaseka Bukenya, said: “It is not enough to have concrete buildings offering health services in locations that are far away from the majority of the population.
We must not only strengthen our health care systems but also extend them to the communities to bridge the existing gap between health care provision and communities”.
To promote a healthy society, Bukenya told the Geneva Health Forum 2008 that systems must work together with other actors providing water and sanitation among majority of the poor, some who die from easily treatable diseases.
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| Doctors attend to patients at a hospital in Kenya. East African countries have been asked to ensure that medical services reach rural areas.
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“We must teach our people to adopt simple yet very important initiatives like proper hygiene practices like washing hands, which will lead to prevention of infectious diseases such as diarrhoea,” he said.
The three East African countries, he said, faced similar health challenges and must work together to address problems affecting their populations.
Bukenya said Africa’s health systems had failed to go to the communities and were instead waiting for people to go to them, something he emphasised must change.
He said including other actors’ like politicians, industrialists and educationists would give multi-sectoral responsibility in strengthening health systems, which must be the vision for Africa now.
Strengthening systems, he said, should have tremendous impact on socio-economic activities of the people, which can translate into tremendous national wealth creation.
Speaking to journalists at a parallel workshop at the forum organised by Media 21, a Global Journalists Network, Bukenya said Uganda had only 2,900 doctors with a doctor-people ratio of 1 to 10,000.
He said capacity building must be a key health care component if new approaches were to be realised.
He said Sub-Saharan Africa had 11 per cent of the world’s population yet it had 24 per cent of the global disease burden and three per cent of the total global health workforce.
Africa, he said, had made remarkable strides in dealing with diseases like sleeping sickness, river blindness in west Africa, bilharzia and guinea worm, but the gains were being reversed by emerging infectious disease like HIV/Aids, drug resistant tuberculosis, chronic non-infectious ones like hypertension and diabetes and poverty.
“Drug resistant malaria is a major issue, too,” said the VP, who is a medical doctor.
He said the problem was being compounded by the brain drain to the developed world and called for international dialogue that would have positive impact on the resource country like split of taxes between the losing and receiving countries.
Dr Mita Roses, director of World Health Organisation Primary Health Care for New Countries, said a new vision of sustainable human development had emerged with deep connections between economic development, democracy and social protection, leading to new formulation of social and health policies.
“This perspective has given health a more prominent place on the global development agenda, therefore strengthening the role of heath in public policies,” she said.
“Benefits accruing from a well-functioning health system are common these days. We need to address health systems segmentation due to different financing sources and the arrangements – reflecting social segmentation by ability or insertion in the labour market.
“This structural feature consolidates and deepens inequality between social groups and is factor in social exclusion,” she said.
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