11 Jul 2016

Assistant manager of procurement in the Ministry of Health, Ms Dorcas Thobega, says her ministry aims at elevating its performance on service delivery. 

Ms Thobega said this during the Ministry of Health procurement retreat, which was attended by all the ministry’s departments and  District Health Management Teams (DHMTs) in Palapye recently.

The main objective of the retreat was for all parties to discuss the annual performance plan of the ministry and procurement. 

Ms Thobega informed the senior procurement staff that as they were working for MoH, their aim was to facilitate the ministry to realise and reach its missions and visions.  

She said they should be seen within their ministry as professionals .

 She said since the ministry dealt with lives of the people, they needed to be reliable at all times. 

She encouraged the procurement staff to take themselves serious, understand their work, and diligently do it without being taught by someone else. She also encouraged the spirit of reading and understanding regulations of their work. 

She said if procurement staff would read regulations that are in line with their duty like the PPDAB Act, they would be in position to fully understand their work and reference it with the act.  

She requested the procurement staff members to understand the boundaries of their work and do accordingly as per the work regulations, and prevent other employees, including their seniors from interfering with their work.  

She said since the retreat was to prepare the procurement staff for the ministry’s reviewing, it is important for them to improve performance so that when Ministry of Health is reviewed it can get better grading. 

Further, Ms Thobega emphasized on the importance of performance reviews adding that they are a factor contributing to the performance of the ministry when it is reviewed and urged them to submit them on time. 

She appealed to procurement staff that when appraising the PDPs, they should always be faithful and avoid making favours. She said giving employees what they are not worth should be avoided at all costs especially if the employee is not performing well. 

She said if employees could be marked according to how they perform their duties, they would improve their performance in duty, and hence the performance of the ministry. During discussions, one of the attendants  Ms Dorothy Modise concurred with Ms Thobega that they have problems with PDPs and need to be trained on how to deal with them. 

Ms Modise suggested that for the ministry to perform better it should regularly conduct meetings with staff from different health departments and DHMTs in which they would exchange ideas.  

She also suggested that all the procurement staff members from Ministry of Health departments and DHMTs should do a similar duty because when they are transferred to different places, they normally find the work frame different from what they were previously doing, and thus contributes to lower performance of the ministry. ENDS