Botswana remains one of the few countries that have achieved the Abuja Declaration of committing at least 15% of its national annual budget towards health. This state of affairs is indeed plausible and desirable considering that Botswana remains one of the countries with high HIV burden which has a potential to reverse gains made thus far in socio, economic and political development.
While we acknowledge government’s commitment to improving health infrastructure, by committing to deliver quality care through revitalisation of primary health care, decentralisation of some decision-making processes to the districts, the expansion of operation hours in clinics from eight to 24hrs and increased private sector participation, it is however, not clear how government intends to address the challenges related to poor service delivery in the health system as well as poor performance of health care workers due to low morale. BONELA continues to receive cases related to medical malpractice and/or negligence as a result of poor adherence to medical standards of good practice and ethics. These cases are related to wrongful diagnosis, administering and prescription of wrong medications, mishandling of women during child birth resulting in avoidable mortalities, just to mention a few. We therefore call upon the government of Botswana to put in place robust systems that will ensure monitoring of quality of care as well as performance of health care providers. These will provide good indicators for the health sector performance.
