Staff Reporter
THE long awaited Public Health Bill draft which seeks among other things to update the country’s Public Health Act (PHA), is now with the Ministry of Health and Child Care.
Zimbabwe currently relies on a single PHA which is about 90 years old and has been criticised for failing to answer to new challenges obtaining in the health sector.
When the PHA was enacted in 1924, such ailments as non communicable diseases, HIV/AIDS, maternal health, key-populations risks among others were not as common as they are today.
This failure by the Act to recognise the new health scenario has made it difficult to combat a number of diseases and even to allocate resources for response purposes making it a must to craft an updated Act.
Although the PHA is regarded as urgent, shortage of staff in the Attorney General’s (AG) office has cause the current delays.
However Binga North legislator Honourable Prince Dubeko-Sibanda who is also a member of the Parliamentary Committee on Health and Child Care has revealed that the AG’s office has now done its part on the Bill and has handed it over to the Health Ministry.
“The draft bill was handed to the Ministry of Health this week. The technocrats in the ministry will be having a workshop to consider whether all their wishes in their policy document as given to the drafters were incorporated. Once they are satisfied, the draft will going to Cabinet.
“I have proposed to the authorities to create a platform where they can pre-empty its contents to the Committee on Health and some stakeholders. I hope that proposal will be considered positively.
“If so, we might be interacting soon on the contents of our forthcoming brand new Public Health Bill,” said Honourable Sibanda.
The draft Bill was submitted to the AG’s office earlier this year and Honourable Dubeko-Sibanda had even promised journalists in February that the process was going to take about two weeks only but interestingly it has taken almost three months.
Last year government sped-up adoption of such Bills as the Local Government Laws Amendments Bill, the Reserve Bank Amendment Bill (to allow introduction of Bonds Notes) and the Judiciary Law Amendment Bill among others.
