12 Jul 2015

Letlhakane Primary Hospital has been functioning without a pharmacist for the past 10 years on account of acute shortage of health personnel, Assistant Minister of Health, Dr Alfred Madigele has said.

Responding to a question posed by Boteti East MP, Mr Sethomo Lelatisitswe in parliament, Dr Madigele said the ministry was facing an acute shortage of health personnel including doctors, pharmacists, dentists and other professionals in the health field.

He said shortage of personnel was caused by several factors such as external training of pharmacists, high attrition rate due to competition from neighbouring countries as well unfavorable working conditions.

He said the ministry was working to address such challenges through placing recruitment advertisements of such positions externally and internally.

Further, he said the ministry was finalising a rationalisation exercise of pharmacy personnel and it would soon be implementing the recommendations of that exercise.

Also, he said through that, a suitably experienced pharmacist would be identified and posted to the District Health Management Team (DHMT).

He added that efforts would be made to ensure that the number and skill pharmacy personnel was appropriate for the size of the DHMT.

Dr Madigele said the University of Botswana Medical School had been engaged to explore the possibility of introducing pharmacy courses to address the local demand of pharmacists, adding that there was strong indication that the course would be introduced in 2016/2017 academic year

Boteti East MP, Mr Lelatisitswe had wanted to know if the minister was aware that Letlhakane Primary Hospital had been functioning for the past 10 years without a pharmacist and when will the issue be addressed. Ends