The Managing Director of the Board of Healthcare Funders in South Africa, Dr. Katlego Motudi, has stated that it is erroneous to think money can solve all of Africa’s health problems.
According to him, there are other important factors like leadership and good governance that are required.
Dr. Motudi is among several experts who are sharing their expertise on natural disasters, harm reduction and emergency management at the 3-day 2nd African Conference on Health Risks Reduction currently underway in Marrakech, Morocco.
The Conference, which has been organized under the patronage of the Moroccan King Mohammed VI, aims to serve as a forum to shed light on the current state of healthcare and food security in Africa with the primary objective of establishing an African framework based on the experiences of African nations and the insights of public health experts.
Its focus is on effective preventive measures to mitigate the effects of human, social, political and economic crises.
In an exclusive interview with Media General Ghana on the sidelines of the conference, Dr. Katlego Motudi was of the opinion that leadership and governance among others play a key role in health care.
He said the WHO lists leadership and governance as the first of six elements in terms of health care reforms.
“If you look at what the WHO recommends in terms of healthcare reforms, there are six elements that they talk about; the first one is leadership and governance,” he stated.
According to him, there is often an illusion that money solves all problems but that is erroneous.
“We often have this thought that if you throw money at a problem, it will solve it but that is not the case.
“You can have all the elements that they (the speakers at the conference) have talked about but central to that is good governance underpinned by political will.”
He also emphasized on the need to train the right people to be ready for disaster eventualities as these do not give notice.
“The second issue is that we need to focus on training of the right sort of personnel that we need to have.
“When you look at health care issues, they say only about 15 to 20% of the challenges require clinicians. The rest, we must look at how we respond to social issues.
“Do we have the right infrastructure? Do we have things like water and sanitation, etc? So, if you want to sort out health care issues, you have to look beyond care.”
Dr. Motudi cautioned that lessons be learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic on how everything revolves around health care.
“…if we did not know how health care is or how important it is, we just have to look at the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic caused us.
“We have to look at how health impacts on every thing else and, in reverse, how everything else impacts on our health care issues,” he said.
By Shirley Ewurama Smith|3news.com|Marrakesh, Morocco