Chairperson, hon Minister, Deputy Minister, I see there are a lot of people from the various entities that have to do with health. We welcome them. I see there are deans, and the chairperson of the Health Professions Council of South Africa, HPCSA, is also here.
Director-General, this is probably the first budget that the ANC feels must be passed and this is the first time that you are here with us. We hope that you are going to handle this budget very well. We congratulate you on being appointed as the Director-General for Health, and we welcome you.
Let me start from the beginning. We are overseeing a department that I think is very important. It is important in the sense that for all of us here and all over the world the first entry into this world is through health, and we exit through health. The health workers and the department are trying to increase the gap between this entry and exit.
If you want to do it well, it obviously has to be done by people who are honest, humble and passionate, and who work with integrity. If you happen to make a mistake, obviously you shorten that gap between the entry and the exit.
Last year we voted a certain amount of money to the department and gave them the money under the umbrella of hope, hope that they were going to do the things they promised to do. I must say, we commend the department and its leadership because they did exactly what they said they were going to do. We therefore commend them and we are happy with how they have done things.
We have seen drug prices drop, especially the HIV/Aids antiretroviral drugs, and I am sure all of us have seen that.
We have seen medical schools getting more money to make sure that we produce more doctors, nurses and health workers. We have seen Medunsa becoming a stand-alone university, as against combining with another university; and a new medical faculty is going to come in Limpopo.
We have seen plans to upgrade five big hospitals, including Mthatha General Hospital. I am not going to mention the other hospitals because of time constraints. We have seen hospitals and clinics being built, including a multidrug-resistant TB, MDR-TB, hospital in KwaZulu-Natal.
We have seen people coming for testing for HIV and Aids without fear because of the HIV counselling and testing, HCT, campaign that has been started by the department. We have seen HIV-positive patients, babies and mothers with CD4 counts below 350 getting ARVs. While we applaud the fact that they are being treated, the most important thing, other than the treatment that they are getting, is that those people who are on ARVs have found that their viral load has dropped so low that they can't infect the people they go out with. We have seen primary health care being prioritised by the department and, in fact, being re-engineered. In KwaZulu-Natal, we have seen people walking from house to house doing primary health care. We have also seen the impact of GeneXpert, which the Minister was talking about. All these things are being done by the department on the budget that we have given them, and that is why we commend the department.
We have seen the Nursing Summit, which was hosted here in South Africa, boosting the morale of the nurses and making them want to stay in South Africa, probably contributing to a very high morale regarding what we are doing in South Africa.
We have seen the auditing of the chief executive officers, although we have not received the reports and audit results in regard to the nursing colleges in South Africa. We therefore again commend the department.
Though we are happy with the budget that we gave the Minister and the department, we are not oblivious to the fact that we are still faced with huge challenges, and these are obviously known to others. These challenges include the quality of our health care, and there is still a lot that needs to be done, but we know that the department is doing something about it.
The child mortality rate and the challenges that go with it are still very big challenges. The maternal mortality rate and the burden of tuberculosis, TB, HIV and the noncommunicable diseases that we talked about are very big challenges. The bottom line in all these things is that if we can have universal coverage - it is going to cover everybody - that will help us to make sure that everybody is covered and all these challenging things are going to be sorted out.
We have seen human resource shortages, especially in the rural areas, Mr Minister - I'm sorry, I nearly said Madam Minister ...