Improved health for all

SONA2018

President Cyril Ramaphosa  used the State of the Nation Address to outline government’s plans to improve South Africa’s health system in the following ways:

• By scaling up the testing and treating campaign and initiating an additional two million people on antiretroviral treatment by December 2020.
• Confront lifestyles diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, cancers and cardiovascular diseases.
• In the next three months the Department of Health will launch a huge cancer campaign similar to the HIV counselling and testing campaign. This will also involve the private sector as a way of mobilising all resources to fight this disease.

President Ramaphosa also said government would continue to work towards implementing universal health coverage through the National Health Insurance (NHI). He highlighted the following:

• The NHI Bill which is ready to be processed through government and will be submitted to Parliament in the next few weeks.
• Certain NHI projects targeting the most vulnerable people in society will commence in April this year.

Fast facts

• The availability of anti-retroviral drugs has led to an increase in life expectancy and low levels of mother-to-child HIV transmission rates.
• Life expectancy increased from 58.8 years in 2007 to 64.3 in 2015 while the death rate fell from 11.6 to 9.6 percent over the same period (Institute of Race Relations).
• Mother-to-child transmissions declined from 8.5 percent in 2008 to 1.5 percent in 2015. As a result, thousands of babies were protected from HIV infection (South African Medical Research Council).
• South Africa will in April 2018 introduce the new fixed-dose combination of three drugs, Tenofovir, Lamivudine and Dolutegravir that will make it easier for patients to adhere to treatment.

Di you know?

• South Africa today has the biggest HIV/AIDS treatment programme in the world with over 3.9 million people on treatment by August 2017.
• All HIV positive South Africans now have access to anti-retroviral drugs irrespective of their CD4 count.