Council Health Service Board Meeting on PBF commended the Church leaders to mobilize their members for Community Health Fund

On 27^th June 2012 Rungwe PBF Pilot Project organized one day meeting for Council Health Service Board. The aim of the meeting was basically to orient the members on Performance Based Financing (PBF) as one of the health Financing model and secondly to update them on Rungwe PBF Pilot Project.

Moreover, It is worth noting that; Council Health Service Board is the highest Organ in the District responsible for all health matters.  Besides, they are the right people responsible for effecting change at District level on health.  

As a recap, the Zonal PBF Coordinator made a presentation divided into two main parts. The first part was on:  PBF as a Concept then expanded to Rungwe PBF Pilot Project- Project objectives; Project expected results, project stakeholders, and PBF Principles in general.

The second part was on the project implementation, what has been achieved so far, what were the challenges faced the project which so to say was a feedback.

These presentations led to very active discussions which were quite useful and as a response from the Board members. Mainly they are focused on these main issues.

The issue of maintaining quality of products/ medical supplies when you have many suppliers, how to move the decision makers so that they adopt PBF as one of the health financing model as other countries in the PBF network, the need for designing the PBF Project Proposal which will incorporate all the Health facilities in Rungwe District- as the Pilot focus more on the Faith Based Health Facilities.  Other important matters raised in the discussion were to mobilize the church Leaders to educate their church members to join Community Health Fund (CHF). Currently, only Government health facilities are responsible for treating Community Health Fund Members, a situation which several times have made the community members to demand establishing Government health facilities along the Faith Based Organization Health Facilities.

Generally, the meeting was a success in this sense. It enabled the board members to understand basic concepts regarding PBF and they appreciated Performance Based Financing (PBF) as the best model to solve many health issues facing the Local Governments and  one of which  is performance and staff motivation. Secondly, they have come up with ways to improve health facilities under the Faith Based Organization by sensitizing their members to join Community Health Fund and thus do away with out of pocket payment for accessing health Care.