On 28th June 2012, Rungwe PBF
Pilot Project Organized one day meeting for Regional Health Management Team
(RHMT)- Mbeya Region and City Council
Management Team Members (CHMT) at
Regional Medical Officer (RMO) Conference room. It was part of Performance
Based Financing (PBF) advocacy in the Region and we used the session as an
opportunity to give feedback on the project implementation to the participants.
The meeting was officially opened by the
Chairman of Christian Social Services Commission (CSSC) Southern Zone after some
brief comments by Regional Medical Officer- Mbeya Region.
Thereafter, the Zonal PBF Coordinator
made presentations, on PBF as Health Financing Model, and feedback of Rungwe
PBF Pilot Project Implementation from 2010- June 2012. PBF) In a nutshell, the presentation
contained: Basic Definition PBF, PBF inception in: Asia, Africa and Tanzania, PBF
Multi- Country Network, Reasons for PBF to be Popular, Key Principles of
Performance Based Financing (PBF), PBF Model on separation of functions. The
other part was on Project inception, its objectives, expected output, stakeholders,
main activities realized, challenges and achievement .
After the
presentation, the participants discussed many issues; which included:
-
Strategies
needed to make the decision makers understand the advantages of Output Based
Financing against traditional model - input based financing,
-
Signing Service
Agreement to lower Level health facilities modalities discussed
-
Delay in fund
disbursement for Basket Fund to Health facilities in various Local Governments was
briefly discussed. It was noted that part of the cause is delay of reporting as
many councils have no specific officer to deal with that. Second, Budgetary
sessions need to be amended, as presently the Budget session ends at the end of
August, while financial year starts 1st July.
-
Another issue raised was to reinstate the
OPRAS (Open Performance Result Assessment) for her staff in order to increase
performance in work place. This was
considered well aligned with Performance Based Financing. It was noted that
there is need to have forums to advocated PBF from Lower level to higher level –
Ministry, which was expressed as what the Project does.
As a way forward, the participants
proposed the following:
-
The responsible authority i.e. Local
Governments to work on modalities for lower Level Health Facilities to Sign
Service Agreement in Rungwe District.
-
The Project in Collaboration with the financier see ways to incorporate the Regional Health Management team members to
be trained on PBF
-
Disseminate PBF through various avenues
in the Region such as Regional Health Committee which is the decision making
organ.
-
Scale up PBF in Mbeya Region- all
districts of Mbeya Region. Regional
Medical Officer indicated that the Region is ready to provide support needed
for the scale up process.
From the general observation, it is obvious that the meeting was
successful and it made the members enthusiastic, that with the available resources
the health Care status in the region could be improved provided that the financing model is changed from input to output based
financing. Below is the group photo of the participants after the meeting.
