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Sexual, reproductive health services to be integrated
2006-09-25 08:55:57
By Simon Kivamwo
Health and Social Welfare Ministry is looking for ways of integrating sexual and reproductive health-related services to remove the stigma that hinders many people from accessing them.
This was disclosed by Tanzania’s Health and Social Welfare Deputy Minister, Dr Aisha Kigoda, in an exclusive interview with The Guardian last week in Maputo, Mozambique.
Dr Kigoda was in the Mozambican capital to attend the Second Special Session of the Conference of African ministers for health. The theme of the conference was Universal Access to Comprehensive Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) Services in Africa.
”We have been asking ourselves why we can’t integrate the SRH-related services. The answer has finally come that we should take the integration initiative now,” Dr Kigoda said, noting that the time to pool resources for people who need services such as family planning, HIV/AIDS-related attention and sexually transmitted Infections (STIs) was ripe.
She said that, being a developing country with limited recourses, Tanzania needed to embrace such entrepreneurial ideas to attain the continental goal of ensuring comprehensive access to SRH services by its people.
For sure, there is no reason for separating the departments that deal with, say, HIV/AIDS, SRH issues, STIs, or even tuberculosis (TB), she said.
”One of the impacts of separating them is, for instance, people seeking for HIV-related services, feel shy to attend their designated health centres fearing they could be seen by others and therefore become targets of stigmatisation and denial.
The minister also hinted about the need to review the health budget to cover all issues under SRH programmes.
”The adoption of this African Union plan of action provides that, we, as Tanzanian government, need to decide how we can match the recommendations adopted,” she said.
She said the challenge ahead of her ministry was to figure out how the health budget would be increased to cater for issues such as human resources development, advocacy and publicity of SRH issues.
”We must eliminate the myth that talking about sexuality on family level was ’unethical’. Rather, we have to go beyond information about sex and other related matters that are part and parcel of our daily life,” she noted.
The ultimate goal of the Maputo Plan of Action was for African governments, civil societies and the private sector and development partners to join forces and implement the continental policy on access to SRH by 2015.
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