North West Health MEC Dr Magome Masike says they are ready to implement the plan to re-engineer primary health care (PHC) in the province at districts and sub-districts.

Presenting his department’s budget speech on Tuesday, Masike announced that the PHC re-engineering plan had been developed to be implemented through the three streams, namely school health services, specialist teams and ward based outreach teams.

“Training has been standardised by the national [Department of Health] and phase one, which is orientation and basic foundation, is provided by a contracted service provider and funded through conditional grants.

“We have started marketing the programme through community dialogues, where 18 sub-districts participated.  We will further strengthen social mobilisation through community dialogues, ward and cluster meetings, the media and other marketing initiatives,” Masike said.

He also announced that the piloting of two monitoring and evaluation systems is nearing the end, with the participating sub-districts including Tlokwe and Greater Taung.

“Data from households has been integrated into the District Health Information System (DHIS) and household registration in pilot wards has been completed. However, some households could not be reached due to various reasons like working occupants during office hours.”

NHI pilot in 2013/2014

Masike said that the department’s efforts to strengthen the implementation of the National Health Insurance (NHI) pilot in 2013/14 included improved supply chain management systems, and processes to support the provision of efficient and effective health services within the pilot district.

He said the department would also enhance the pilot district capacity in the areas of District Health Planning and Monitoring and Evaluation, as well as strengthening the referral system, with a particular focus in rural and previously disadvantaged areas.

“Appropriate communication equipment will be made available at all levels of the referral system to equip outreach teams, PHC facilities and hospitals to provide appropriate care at all levels.

“There will be a full scale roll out of Integrated Chronic Disease Management, and Community Health Worker equipment for chronic disease screening throughout the pilot district. Twenty-two pharmacists’ assistants will be trained in post basic and 35 nurses will be trained on drug supply management,” Masike said.

He noted that the department had no budget for the district specialist team posts needed to have a community psychiatrist on the team to support peripheral facilities. They would approach the National Department of Health to support them on this.

Improving IT equipment

Masike also announced that focus would be placed on improving IT equipment, software, networks and connectivity for improved support from referral hospitals.

The pilot sites will also have the electronic patient’s record, life tracking and bio-metrics system to strengthen the referral system by improved access to patient records.

“We will provide all the necessary support to community health workers (CHW) and outreach teams with uniforms and identification tags. Some of the resources to be made available to them include pepper spray, whistles, name tag, branded clothing, phones, etc,” he said.

Masike further highlighted a need to align the budget in order to procure school mobile units as well as vehicles for Ward Based Primary Health Care Outreach Teams.

“We have progressively started registering CHWs into the PERSAL system and we want to complete this process within 2013/2014 financial year.”