BY DELISA THWALA
MBABANE– Honourable Minister of Health Lizzie Nkosi presented a well-documented and detailed report to Parliament; she further appreciated the chairperson and the Portfolio committee for Health, for granting her the opportunity to present the preamble to the Ministry of Health’s Annual Performance Report for 2022-3023.
The Minister spelt out that the report has nine chapters, which include activities and programmes that the health sector was able to conduct and achievements realised in spite of the challenges it faced.
These achievements were realised due to, among other things, the effort Health Care Workers put and support received from both houses of Parliament, Cabinet, central agencies, health partners and civil society.
The Honourable Minister highlighted that all the work the Ministry does, as a sector is aimed at improving the health status of the population of Eswatini, in other words, the Ministry implemented activities and programmes so that the Eswatini population can be healthy.
The ministry has 5,015 established posts and 4544 were filled. This means that there were 474 vacancies.
The distribution of the vacant posts was 141 were allied health professionals/paramedics. There were also 10 medical/dental officers; 95 were nurses/midwives and 228 were Environmental health, Administration, and support staff. During this financial year the ministry was able to recruit 337 health workers.
“The Ministry increased its revenue collection to E4 421 953 from E222 239 collected in the same period of 2021 to n2022. This represented an increase of 4.7 per cent,” said the Minister.
In addition the Minister said there were 207 513 people living with HIV who were on Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART), which is about 96 per cent of the population living with HIV in the country. It should be noted that 99 per cent of pregnant women who are living with HIV were on ART, resulting in a 0.6 per cent rate of transmission of HIV from mother to child at the age of six to eight weeks. Eswatini is therefore very close to eliminating mother to child.
