Hon House Chair and members, again the consideration of this report, quite obviously, requires the concerted efforts of both the Minister of Health and the Minister of Basic Education to protect those who are most vulnerable in our communities. The finding of the South African Human Rights Commission highlights a longstanding point of the IFP, in which we call for the interdepartmental collaboration and knowledge sharing in the realm of mental health care and service provision.
The collaborative efforts by departments help to spread the funds for expenditure and assist with the reduction of the duplication of the skills, as each department has strengths of their own in addressing the problems.
The poor state of services in South Africa leaves one to wonder how the National Health Insurance will take into account the high demands for the infrastructure and programmes needed to address mental health issues. Government needs to lay a stable ground before we can embark on the universal system of health care. We see that there are material challenges with regard to the state of mental health in South Africa and support the call for greater control to be decentralised into local government.
Local government must be sufficiently empowered to respond to the needs of the individual communities, so that rural areas like Jozini in KwaZulu- Natal receive sufficient funding in terms of mental illness. The IFP supports this report.
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