By Sellah Singini

Lilongwe May 2, Mana: Chief of Health Services–Technical in the Ministry of Health Dr. Lilian Chunda has asked the private sector in the country to finance the health sector in order to ensure that every Malawian is able to access high-quality healthcare services.

Chunda said this in an interview with journalists on Thursday in Lilongwe after a breakfast meeting on health financing which was organized under the theme “Unlocking Sustainable Healthcare Financing for Malawi: Leveraging the Private Sector”.

Chunda said, almost half of the health budget comes from the donors and instead of depending on the donors there is need to promote domestic revenue collection from government as well as the private sector so that the health system should not collapse when donors are pulling out.

“Health delivery is not cheap. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), health sector is supposed to spend almost 86 dollars per capital in terms of expenditure per patient but what we have in Malawi is half of that. And you only find that 10 percent of that goes to the actual service of the provision of patient care.

Some of the health services that we have are very expensive and as a ministry we cannot manage to do those things on ourselves so this is why we want the private sector to help us. They can help us in terms of the actual health service delivery for example doing Cardiology services, investing in infrastructures, helping in referral systems as well as supporting research and other innovations,” She said.

In his remarks, Chief Executive Officer for Press Trust Gibson Ngalamila said Press Trust has been involved in financing health initiatives both in private and public sector since 2001.

He said, in 2001 Press Trust saw a need to establish a tertiary health institution in the name of Mwaiwathu Private Hospital with an aim of making specialist care accessible in Malawi.

“We achieved that, but the facility itself is still very small as the ministry is saying that we need to expand services. We need to go into Oncology, Cardiology and many more. We have taken over the Orthopedic services and we are doing Dialysis but that is not enough because the population has increased and we are only available in Blantyre. We want to expand in Blantyre and we also want to move the services to Lilongwe,” Ngalamila said

Therefore, the ministry is calling us upon to mobilize funding from the private sector to build a business that can provide tertiary healthcare services to Malawians so that we do not refer a lot of Malawians outside the country such as India, South Africa and such other places,” He added.

He therefore urged the private sector to work together so as to lessen the financing burden the Ministry of Health faces.