The Deputy Prime Minister Rt. Hon. Moses Ali has today, 23rd September launched the 2021 Operational Plan and the 2024 Global Health Security Agenda National Commitments.
The office of the Prime Minister has been partnering with and coordinating the implementing of the actions of the ministry especially in emphasizing the essence of national health security.
Following this, a two day Joint External Evaluation(JEE) consensus meeting was held at Imperial Royale hotel where assessment of JEE in Uganda was done and national commitments of Global Health Security Agenda(GHSA) 2024 were made.
According to Dr.Issa Makumbi of PHEOC, “ Outbreaks are more complex and easily spread in a very short time and as such member states should develop and sustain core capacities to prevent the spread of and respond to public health emergencies, complying with the IHR.”
GSHA was launched in 2014 to accelerate the compliance of member states in this regard but a number of gaps were found in the JEE which gaps were meant to be closed.
Since then, there has been in an improvement in sectors like Immunization and Emergency Response Operations.
There still remains a lot of work to be done hence priority actions for 2021 -2022 have been proposed like linking public health with security authorities, emergency preparedness, national lab system and points of entry into the country.
Uganda’s health system resilience and contribution to the 2024 GHSA targets was tackled by Dr. Rhoda Wanyenze, the Professor and Dean of Makerere University School of Public Health.
In her observations, she noted that there were things we needed to drop as a country post covid. “A lot of the challenges that we need to address are outside health and we have a lot of disease arising from this like poverty. Resilience therefore is the ability to absorb shocks and continue to do what we are supposed to do.”, noted Dr. Rhoda.
Resilience is far more than just being about controlling epidemics but also being able to solve problems like corruption, pollution and rapid population growth.
Among the commitments of GHSA 2024 agreed upon were; licensing of all labs in Uganda by 2024 in all sectors, designating 05 high volume points of entry for Uganda, and decentralizing one health approach in 50 districts by 2024.
The Deputy Prime Minister and the representative of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tegegn Yonas both congratulated the ministry of health for the tremendous work done in controlling the spread of the pandemic and complying with the IHR.