The Ministry of Health has been allocated $13 million under the State General Budget (OJE) of 2014 to address the country’s medicine and consumables shortage.
The money will also be used to improve medical facilities.
The President of Commission F (health, education, and culture and gender equality affairs) Member of Parliament (MP), Virgilio da Costa Hornai, said this year’s budget was big in comparison to last year’s health budget of $5 million.
He said the medicine shortage had not been resolved because of mismanagement in health facilities.
The mismanagement had resulted in the absence of a reliable inventory of medical supplies to show which items were needed by health facilities.
“It doesn’t mean that there’s no money, but a lack of good management,” Hornai said.
He said the budget would also be used to buy ambulances for health facilities around the country, many of which did not have ambulances.
MP Manuel Gaspar Soares da Silva called on the Ministry of Health to fix the management problem, so people would no longer fall victim to the medicine shortage now the budget had been increased so substantially.
Minister for Health Sergio da Costa Lobo said the management of medicine was still an area of concern but one the ministry was addressing by obtaining records of money spent on medical supplies.
“The monitoring problem is that we don’t know what they spent in the districts but this year we have standardized the medicine inventories of each health facility,” said Minister Lobo.
He said to assure distribution of medicine to all health facilities, the storeroom systems had been improved, as had the capacity of the staff to manage the distribution of medicine to health facilities.
