MEC for health, Sasekani Manzini, tabled the 2019/20 policy and budget speech on Tuesday.

The department has a total budget of R14 386 809 000. The speech touched on various issues in the Department of Health.

According to Manzini, interventions implemented to eliminate deaths caused by malaria are working because the department has reported 19 malaria deaths in 2018/19 from 96 in 2017/18.

To date there has been three deaths due to malaria this year.

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The strategy includes increasing the number of personnel responsible for the supervision of indoor residual spraying by contracting 56 senior malaria admin officers for a period of three years and 340 temporal spray operators for a period of six months, while continuing to work in collaboration with Mozambique and Swaziland.

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The declining trend of TB cases is prevalent in Mpumalanga where the TB cases decreased from 18 856 in 2014 to 11 820 in 2018, with TB still, however, remains the number-one killer disease in the province.

One of challenges in TB management is patients defaulting treatment or being lost to follow-up. She urged the communities to work hand in hand with the department to encourage TB patients to complete their treatment and get cured.
“We will be rolling out a programme aimed at tracing our lost patients that we don’t see on scheduled appointments to reduce the number of patient defaulting on their medication,” said Manzini.