Assistant Minister of Health, Lelatisitswe Sethomo recently informed informed Parliament that shortage of medication has become a thing of the past.
When giving the House an update on the matter, he said there has been good progress.
“I can speak confidently, that the steps that we took then, to avail medications in the country, as I did apprise this House in the past, have significantly improved our medications availability situation in the country. We currently have an acceptable supply of all major medications that were not available for most of last year and the beginning of this year.”
The Assistant Minister said these include medications for chronic conditions such as Hypertension, Cancer, Diabetes and others. Most vaccines like those for children and other Extended Programme of Immunisation (EPI) vaccines, Anti-Retroviral Vaccines (ARVs), anti-diarrhoeal medications and Tuberculosis (TB) medications, have largely been available in good supply, even when the situation was dire for other medications.
He assured Batswana that the government has been largely successful in bringing medications to the country, despite the difficult situation.
Sethomo, however, said the government received notice from the Botswana Nurses Union (BONU) that its members will no longer dispense medications in public health facilities because they felt that continuing to do so would offend certain legislations.
He said in line with this notice, most nurses and midwives have not been dispensing medications in most health facilities since July 1, 2023.
He added: “I cannot deny that this has affected service delivery in our health facilities. This is indeed unfortunate because, Batswana suffered some months ago, when there were no medications in the country and they are suffering again now, when medications are now available.”
He said they had immediately instructed their legal teams to look at the laws for any possible remedy while they had also embarked on an aggressive recruitment exercise for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians.
On the developments, he stated that they had so far, recruited more than 100 pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to help dispense medications in public health facilities.
“Our District Health Medical Teams (DHMTs) have, therefore, made arrangements for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to dispense medications in our clinics on certain times and days,” he said.
On the issues of medical doctors, the Assistant Minister said government successfully negotiated and agreed with Botswana Doctors Union for amongst others, payment of call allowance.
