KAMPALA– Prime Minister, Robinah Nabbanja has admitted that 82 districts in Uganda have no single public General Hospital, with over Shs6.743Trn required to construct these health facilities in these areas.
Nabbanja made the revelation during Prime Minister’s question time, at the Thursday plenary sitting, where she was responding to a question raised by Andrew Ojok (Omoro County) on what plans Government has for the upgrade of Health Centre IVs to Hospitals in districts that don’t have hospitals?
The Prime Minister revealed that currently, there are 47 public general hospitals, 16 regional referral hospitals, 5 national referral hospitals and 4 specialized national hospitals and although the Presidential Strategic Guidelines and Directives 2016 require the health sector to ensure that each district should have a general hospital, the current status implies that, there are 82 districts without public hospitals.
“The estimated cost for construction and equipping of a national general hospital is UGX70Bn. To fully operationalize a general hospital, we require recurrent costs including wages, non-wage recurrent, medicines and health supplies estimated at UGX12.238Bn. Government’s plan is to upgrade Health Centre IVs to General Hospitals in a phased manner starting with districts with relatively high population or deserve special attention because of their geographical location like the island districts,” said Nabbanja.
The Prime Minister further added that the situation is worse in lower health facilities, indicating that currently, 1,696 out of 2,184 sub counties and Town Councils have no Health Centre IIIs.
She however added that the construction of 31 new HC IIs is ongoing under the UgIFT program and these are expected to be completed in FY2024/25, although, the Ministry of Health requires additional resources to establish Health Centre IIIs in the remaining 488 sub-counties.
The Prime Minister also revealed that the Ministry of Health Draft National Health Policy has introduced a reform of upgrading the status of Health Centre IVs (24 bed capacity) to Community Hospitals (60 bed capacity) and these projects will be undertaken in a phased manner, prioritizing existing Health Centre IVs with high catchment population and the 135 constituencies without Health Centre IVs based on geographical access, population coverage and resources availability.
“The estimated cost for construction of a Community Hospital is UGX12Bn and equipping is UGX4Bn, total is UGX16Bn. To fully operationalize a Community Hospital, we require recurrent costs including wage, non-wage recurrent, medicines and health supplies estimated at UGX4.109Bn per annum,” explained Nabbanja.
Ojok in another question also asked the Prime Minister to explain what plans Government has put in place to curb and eventually eradicate malaria in Northern Uganda and Uganda at large, arguing that although malaria is a preventable disease, Malaria is one of the top killers in Northern Uganda and Uganda in general.
The Premier in response admitted that Uganda is indeed highly endemic for malaria and globally, Uganda ranks 3rd in global malaria burden and 8th in reported malaria-related and reported deaths and this is because Uganda is very fertile ground for malaria and the regions with traditionally high transmission and have recorded most malaria cases and deaths include; West Nile, Acholi, Lango, Teso, Busoga and Bukedi.
The Prime Minister urged lawmakers to encourage their electorates to use the preventable tools in order to prevent the transmission of malaria, saying this is one of the challenges Government is facing.
“We have challenges with the use of preventive tools by the population. Our main preventative tool is the treated mosquito net. We distributed 28 million nets in 2023. However, the demographic health survey report of 2023 indicates that though net coverage is more than 95%, net use by the population is only approximately 60%.” Remarked Nabbanja.
