By: Nyima Sillah
The Chairman of the National Assembly Health Committee, Amadou Camara, has opined that the seventy-one million five hundred thousand Dalasi (D71,500,000)budget allocations to the health ministry for overseas treatment is not sufficient.
He affirmed that overseas treatment is expensive as most cases that have been referred overseas are cases that cannot be managed in The Gambia, and requires a lot of technical issues and financial support.
“Seventy-one million, five hundred thousand cannot cater for the entire Gambia, but the Ministry is coming up with an initiative to have some post-graduate training for medical doctors at Edward Francis Small Teaching Hospital, and Kanifing General Hospital so that some of these critical cases can be cured in the country to reduce the burden,” NAM Camara told The Voice in an interview on Tuesday.
He emphasized that overseas treatment issues are cross-cutting, as everybody wants it, and it is managed at the Ministry of Health, noting that some people pass through lawmakers in seeking such assistance. This, he said, made them realize that the amount is not sufficient.
“Before the budget bilateral finished, we told the Ministry of Health to do their best to ensure that there is additional money appropriated for that and when we received the budget, we saw that it was increased from fifty million Dalasi(D50,000,000) to seventy-one million Dalasi (D71, 500,000). It means D21.5M was added when compared to last year’s. It is a good start and next year, we can see how we can adjust it,” he explained.
The House health committee chair disclosed that the committee is planning to conduct a quarterly expenditure review on the social sectors, adding that health is inclusive. NAM Camara explained that after the first quarter, they will do a review to know how some of the budget lines have been executed.
“Budget monitoring is a process and needs to start somewhere and every year when we are doing budget approval, we ask them how they spent the previous year’s money, but that is not enough. We should go further, interrogate them to give us the report on what is spent and how it was spent,” he stressed.