The Managing Director of the Board of health care funders in South Africa, Dr. Katlego Motudi has said delivering effective healthcare goes beyond financial resources.
He says good governance and leadership are part of the processes in solving healthcare issues and has advised African leaders to look beyond financial commitments.
Dr. Motudi was among several experts who shared their expertise on Natural disasters, harm reduction and emergency management at the three-day 2nd African Conference on Health Risks Reduction currently underway in Marrakech, Morocco.
The conference which has been organised under the patronage of the Moroccan King Mohammed VI has brought together experts from across the world to share their expertise on risk management and reduction.
It is serving 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’s Ewurama Smith 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 health care reforms, there are six elements that they talk about; The first one is leadership and governance,” he stated.
According to him, the assertion that money solves all problems is an illusion.
“We often have this distort 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 indicated.
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,” he advised.
Highlighting on the social conditions that help improves health care, he spoke on the need to have in place the right infrastructure, water and sanitation among others, concluding that: “So, if you want to sort out health care issues, you have to look beyond care.”
He used the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic as to explain how health care revolves around everything and the vice versa.
“…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.
