OPINION: The promise of a financial boost for TB programmes – where to from here?

Posted in: Latest, TB, TB

South Africa’s new National Strategic Plan for HIV, TB, and STIs 2023-2028 and the country’s TB Recovery Plan necessitate a sharp increase in TB testing and increased enrolment into care, which will require additional spending on testing and medicines. Sihle Mahonga Ndawonde argues that a joint committee should be set up to review and interrogate provincial departments’ resource allocation decisions for the next three years.

OPINION: Budget 2023 – opportunity missed to refocus public health spending?

Posted in: Healthcare system, Latest, NHI

Budgets, while important, are not the right mechanism to drive the structural change needed to improve the responsiveness of our public health system in meeting the needs of the population. But, argues Russel Rensburg, we can reorient the health system towards meeting the health needs of the population and then let the budget bolster the reforms. Here he provides some suggestions on how to go about it and contrasts that with the budget announced by Minister of Finance Enoch Godongwana this week.

Opinion: Health needed a recovery budget, we got the opposite

Posted in: Healthcare system, Latest

For healthcare, a post-pandemic human rights-focused budget would have allocated funding specifically for backlogs in access to health services from the past two years, as well as tackling the present inequities in access to healthcare that characterise the public health system. Tshidi Lencoasa, Khanyisa Mapipa, and Julia Chaskalson argue that this year’s budget does not do enough to enable government to realise people’s fundamental human right to access healthcare.