05 Aug 2024

Effective national response and preparedness on health emergencies require a multi-sectoral cohesive plan.

Secretary in the Department of Primary Health Care in the Ministry of Health, Dr Mareko Ramotsababa said this at the opening National Health Emergency Response Operations Plan workshop in Gaborone on Monday.

He said like many countries, Botswana was susceptible to large scale emergencies and disasters stemming from various elements.

He said emergencies, regardless of their nature universally shared common features; adding they posed high risk of loss of lives which brought disturbances to the health and social services.

Generally, Dr Ramotsababa said, many people were still suffering the aftermath of COVID-19, underscoring the need for immediate and coordinated actions across systems, sectors, stakeholders guided by defined leadership.

He said the workshop was a step in the direction of  a well-coordinated, cohesive, with single response. 

He further said the presence of districts representation was appreciated because districts were where things happened.

He said the success of developing and implementing the plan that came through collective responsibility and extended to all stakeholders, would put the country in a better health status, because such effort would come up with a beneficial product.

Acting executive director of Botswana Public Health Institute, Dr Thebeyame Macheke said health security was poorly understood in Botswana, adding that health security was about resilient  multi-sectoral health that could withstand pandemic outbreaks.

He said usually they failed because they had no written, practiced and simulated tangible plans aiding them to draw plans from identified limitations, gaps and weaknesses to be able to strategise priority competencies they did not have.

He further said they had 19 International Health Regulatory core capacities they looked to be empowered on if they were to be ready for any eventuality of an outbreak or pandemic.

Dr Macheke said it was impossible to reach 100 per cent as they had to continuously improve. He said the idea of joint external evaluation was to see how much improvement they had made over time, adding that the last evaluation indicated they had a lot of work to do.

He further said they had to draw contingency plans specific to the listed top 10 priorities to see how Botswana fared.  Ends