Hogan remedy for provincial health woes ‘ignored’

A comprehensive blueprint for rehabilitating provincial health departments, drawn up during the brief tenure of former national health minister, Barbara Hogan, is being largely ignored by the current health leadership regime. This claim emerged in a critique of the health component of Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s budget speech this February by the widely respected NGO’s, Section 27 and the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). Chief among their concerns about the efficacy of the R11 billion boost to the 20011/12 health budget is the ‘lack of a reasonable plan to address endemic and systemic problems’ of budgeting and spending within provincial health departments and their national counterpart. Said Daygan Eager, a spokesperson for the two NGO’s, ‘Its difficult to determine precisely what health service is being delivered, what needs to be delivered and what it will cost without aligning health needs and priorities to budgets’. When Izindaba probed this observation, the existence of the ‘Hogan Blueprint’ emerged – an exhaustive report by some of the country’s top health experts into dysfunctional provinces, complete with turnaround plan