Africa-Press – Botswana. Minister of Health, Dr Edwin Dikoloti has pledged to ensure that implementation of integrated primary health care is fully supported by all countries across the world.
Dr Dikoloti was speaking virtually at the official opening of the HLB-SIMPLe annual meeting in Gaborone on Tuesday.
HLB-SIMPLe is an alliance made up of researchers on HIV/High Blood pressure integration across six countries in Africa being Botswana, South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, Mozambique and Zambia. It’s acronym is derived from: Heart, Lung, and Blood Co-morbiditieS IMplementation Models in People Living with HIV.
Reflecting on the three day annual meeting that has gathered researchers from across African countries, the newly elected president of the World Health Assembly was hopeful that the discussions would help find better ways to achieve integrated HIV/High blood pressure services.
“It is through your advice and research findings, that we could as a country achieve our national target of 70 per cent of persons living with high blood pressure, having their blood pressure fully under control,” he said.
He emphasised that implementation of integrated primary health care would safeguard the health of people.
He said the integrated primary health care aimed to take the health sector to the next level of development, adding that it would also focus on gaining deeper insights on integration of Hypertension and HIV services.
“The integration is urgently needed, and holds a great promise in advancing key health outcomes for our people,” said Dr Dikoloti.
He said Botswana was currently grappling with a growing burden of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) that were threatening to reverse many of the gains in the health sector. He also said President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi launched the Botswana NCD strategy in 2019, as a demonstration of Botswana’s commitment to addressing the challenges of NCDs at the highest level.
He said the national NCD strategy was clear on key actions to be taken, and the indicators for high priority areas like the number of facilities providing primary health care screening services, number of patients screened for overweight and unhealthy living.
He reassured that the Ministry of Health, will continue to avail necessary resources to support initiatives geared towards reducing high NCDs burden.
He further said government, through its digitalisation initiative connected high speed internet to most public hospitals and clinics across the country.
He said the service was intended to ensure that health workers and researchers could consider the use of information and communications technologies in designing health interventions that could among others, ease congestions at densely populated localities.
The Associate Professor and Acting Dean , Faculty of Medicine at the University of Botswana(UB), Prof Billy Tsima said through HLB-SIMPLe, each country had a group of researchers, supported by National Institute of Health (NIH, USA) conducting clinical trials to improve blood pressure control among people living with HIV.
He said the Botswana group was based at UB and worked closely with Ministry of Health HIV and NCD programme, supported by the ministry’s informatics team to enhance electronic documentation of national NCDs.
The 2024 HLB-SIMPLe annual meeting was held under the theme: Integrating HIV and Non-Communicable Diseases Programmes for Scale-Up and Sustainability: Leveraging Community Engagement, which he said would work on developing strategies to improve blood pressure control across the six African countries.
“We are thrilled to be associated with work that is designed to have direct positive impact in the lives of those living with high blood pressure,” he said.
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