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"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I thank you very much for allowing me to speak and support the Vote for the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation, Vote 49. From the onset, may I thank the Minister for her frequent consultations with our Committee in regard to her Budget proposals. When we required the Minister to appear before the Committee, she did so and we interrogated the Budget together, having first had a briefing by the Budget Office of the National Assembly. Let me thank the parliamentary staff, the Budget Office, the Clerk of the National Assembly and the Speaker for the support that my Committee has enjoyed. May I register that for a country to grow economically, it must have a healthy population. Before we address ourselves to any other development agenda in this country, we must address the issue of our health. This is the mandate of the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation, which is charged with the responsibility of preventive and promotive health care. At this juncture, I would like to thank the Ministry of Finance for the consideration it has given to this particular Ministry. In the last Financial Year 2009/2010, the Ministry had an allocation of Kshs19 billion. In this current financial year, the Ministry made a request for Kshs21 billion and it was allocated Kshs22.5 billion, an excess of Kshs1.5 billion, which puts the Ministry and the Minister a step forward to offer services beyond the planned ones. We, as a Committee, shall be putting our eyes on the Ministry to see that the extra funds of Kshs1.5 billion are used to offer services that will benefit the population of this country. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the Minister has said quite a lot about our standing in our budgetary allocation to our population compared to the rest of the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) has put it at US$34 per capita to provide very basic health care. Of course, we are signatories to the Abuja Declaration as already mentioned by the Minister. We are also signatories to the Maputo Declaration. We have put ourselves afoot to reach the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. This is a commitment by the Government. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, Millennium Development Goals Nos.4 and 5 talk about maternal mortality and child mortality. We want to change this situation. It is disturbing that we lose 448 mothers from child bearing related conditions, which are preventable. These are issues which must be addressed by this Ministry, so that we can attain the Millennium Development Goals and Vision 2030. We cannot get there even though we have the information, unless in our budgetary allocations, we address these concerns. As I indicated earlier last year, despite our commitment, even in Abuja, to raise our health sector annual budget to 15 per cent of the national Budget, we only managed to raise it to 5.4 per cent. In the current financial year, we have managed to raise it to only between 6 and 7 per cent of our national Budget. This gives us a big gap, although there is still growth in budgetary allocation by the Treasury. We still need to increase our budgetary allocation to the health sector if we expect to provide health services that will serve our people well. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, despite the many good things that the Ministry has done, there are areas in respect of which we need to raise concerns. In particular, these will include the Economic Stimulus Programmes (ESPs) that the Ministry undertook from the last financial year. We want to emphasise that the Ministry ensures that the programmes we embarked on in the last financial year are brought to completion by either the end of the current financial year or the year after. They must come to end, so that we do not put public resources into waste. Hon. Members will remember that in infrastructure, we have already embarked on construction of wards. Those projects have to come to completion and get drugs and the equipment needed for them, so that we finally take Kenyans to the model health centres that we have intended to take them to. We recruited nurses in the last financial year. The Ministry has done very well to employ 20 nurses per constituency. This is the direction we want to request the Ministry to go in respect to other areas, so that as we have nurses, we consider recruiting other technical officers. It is the recommendation of this Committee that the Ministry recruits clinical officers to run the facilities and give prescriptions to the patients who will visit those health centres; we should have lab technicians, so that we can provide comprehensive healthcare. We want to urge the Minister, as a Committee, that we get the right equipment in good time, so that we can put it into use. The frequent stock-outs of drugs in medical facilities are also a concern to Kenyans, and the Committee recommends that the Ministry looks into this issue. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, as I conclude, there is a concern that there are staff members in this Ministry who are on contract from our development partners. We are asking that these be considered, so that as their contracts come to an end, the Ministry absorbs them, so that we do not create a vacuum in service delivery in those areas where these technical personnel are serving. Finally, there was an indication of hiring 300 ambulances for this Ministry. The Committee would want this deferred until there is proper consultation. It is the proposal of the Committee to the Ministry that the ambulances be purchased so that they can be owned by the Ministry rather than hiring them for one year or for whatever period of time, and then surrendering them back to their owners. This will not give us value for our money as a country. Therefore, we are asking the Ministry to do full consultation before arriving at the best way forward in procurement of ambulance services. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to congratulate the Ministry for the Health Sector Service Fund. What I want to indicate on this is that as the funds go to the specific health facilities, there is need for the committees in those health facilities to be strengthened, and have their capacities improved before they are given funds; that is the only way in which they will be able to manage the funds. This is a new thing to them, and we do not expect them to be effective in management of those resources. The Ministry needs to re-look at its allocation to family planning and maternal child mortality, as I alluded to earlier. We need to control our population. Until there are proper family planning mechanisms put in place, we may not manage, because development must be related to population growth. Therefore, we must manage our family planning. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), as a research institution, needs funding. The trend in this country is that we have parastatals and other public institutions, which we surrender, in terms of funding, to our development partners. Therefore, we live on chance or the goodwill of our development partners. We are, therefore, asking that the Government re-looks at its funding, particularly in this financial year, of KEMRI, if we expect effective research to be carried out by this institution. The funding for KEMRI is quite low, and we need to address it. Finally, the Minister has already talked about employment of more technical staff, comprising of nurses and others. We want, as a Committee, to advise that we shall not have sufficient technical personnel in this country for hire, unless we increase the training capacity of the Medical Training College (MTC). Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, until the Government allocates money for the expansion of existing MTC, so that we have sufficient space to train more nurses, clinical officers and other technical personnel, we may need to employ more technical staff and find that we do not have enough of them. I fear that we may not get the 15 nurses we want to employ for each constituency this financial year. With those very many remarks, it is my pleasure to record that, as a Committee, we support Vote 49, Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation."
}