The question asked by the hon member refers to the Health Compact. The social health compact recommendations were summarised into the nine pillars relating to the key elements of the health care system. It refers to the human resources, medicine supply, infrastructure, private sector engagement, improvement of the quality of the primary health care services, public sector financial management and development of information systems. For each of these areas, there are clear deliverables with targets which has been reflected in the department's annual performance plans either at national or provincial level.
The department has started with the implementation of these plans. On the human resources, the Ministerial task team was established and the human resources for health strategy is being finalised which incorporates a number of human resource issues raised in the compact. This team presented in the National Health Council about three weeks ago. There is reorganisation of health organogram at provincial and national levels to reprioritise the filling of critical posts and to shift resources for service delivery at the front end.
The shortages with regard to the critical staff and statutory posts to a combined total of 3133 were filled using the stimulus package that members asked about earlier. These posts included critical posts for doctors, nurses, allied health professionals as well as support staff which were 2638 posts in total and statutory posts for interns amounted to 495.
On medicine supply, one of the key factors affecting the availability of medicine is that the provinces do not budget adequately to ensure that there are funds available to pay suppliers. We have finalised our calculations for the budgets
required by each province and we will ringfence those funds to protect the medicine budget. The Department of Health at national level has supported provinces to ensure sustainable availability of medicine. The support was in the form of the electronic stock management system. It was implemented in hospitals such as Rx solution.
The department has also procured the necessary hardware on behalf of the provinces to support the automation of the medicine supply chain, enabling to ensure better stock management. We have procured 1297 computers, 1500 label and multi function printers. The support continues this financial year as well. We have further established what is called National Surveillance Centre, which receives data from facility based system, such as stock visibility system which was developed to monitor stock at the hand of the primary healthcare data from electronic stock management, such as Rx solution mostly form hospitals and large community centres.
More recently data received from what we call the National Department of Health's Central Chronic Medicine Dispensing and
Distribution, CCMDD service providers, an automated dispensing unit. This just ensures visibility of medicine availability throughout the entire medicine supply chain in the provinces. In addition, we embarked on an initiative to develop supply chain capacity at provincial and national levels which is being done in collaboration with the University of Witwatersrand.
On infrastructure, we have indicated that we have got a team that is working on what we call a ten year plan that we must revamp all our facilities in the horizon of five to seven years. This work is continuing. On financial management, here we have got National Chief Financial Officer's, CFO Forums which is overseeing the movement of cash and cash flow availability and the structuring of debts and reprioritisation particularly of older debts and filling up the posts in CFO offices, dealing with issues of supply chain and ensuring that we have adequate capacity. Thank you.
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