IT is pointless to allocate more money to the Ministry of Health and Medical Services in the 2025 National Budget if it cannot use the funding allotted to it.
The comments by the Fiji Medical Association (FMA) president, Dr Alipate Vakamocea, were raised amid concerns of poor governance across the health sector and the absence of annual reports since 2021.
“If we are unable to spend allocated money, that is a key red flag regarding poor governance,” said Dr Vakamocea.
“While FMA has been advocating for an increase in health spending … what we have been seeing over the past few years is that the Ministry of Health has been returning tens of millions of dollars in unused money.
“We foresee that this will be the same issue this year so it is no use budgeting more money for the ministry when it seems they are unable to use it all.”
He petitioned the Government to increase the salaries of allied health staff such as those in pharmacy, radiology, laboratory and physiotherapy.
“We need to be able to create more positions for allied health staff to meet the needs of our rural communities — at the moment we are unable to do that.
“One of the biggest public-private partnerships the government committed to is the ASPEN hospital. To date, we have seen no reports or feedback on this strategy.
“Over $90million was allocated to ASPEN again in this current financial year and yet, the taxpayers see no reports so we cannot judge the effectiveness of these strategies.”
He said Fiji continued to face shortage of critical medicines, consumables and biomedical equipment despite returning millions of dollars in unspent funding.
Dr Vakamocea also called for the outsourcing of the Fiji Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Service.
“This is a critical service that lacks good governance and (it) should be outsourced as a public-private partnership. The medical sector has experienced for years that this service is defunct, yet the ministry has done nothing to address this.
“They keep talking about Msupply which is the program that should address this, but the software is useless if people don’t enter data correctly and efficiently.”
He said they were unable to gauge the performance of the Ministry of Health and Medical Services for the past four years in the absence of annual reports since 2021.
