Doctors, nurses to have two licences in new govt plan
Nurses attend to a patient inside the Arthroplasty ward in Mulago National Referral Hospital during a media tour of the hospital in Kampala, Uganda, March 28 2024. PHOTO/ISAAC KASAMANI
What you need to know:
- This comes as the Allied Health Professionals Council (AHPC) prepares to unveil a new five-year strategic plan, with a fresh focus on regulation, accountability, and rooting out quack practitioners from the health system
The government is pushing for a dual licensing system for Uganda’s allied health professionals to curb conflicts of interest and unethical conduct linked to unchecked private practice.
This comes as the Allied Health Professionals Council (AHPC) prepares to unveil a new five-year strategic plan, with a fresh focus on regulation, accountability, and rooting out quack practitioners from the health system.
The AHPC is a statutory body mandated to regulate, supervise, and control the training and practice of Allied Health Professionals in Uganda, and ensure practitioners meet ethical and professional standards to safeguard public health. The latest revelation from the Director General of Health Services in the Ministry of Health, Dr Charles Olaro, comes ahead of AHPC’s new five-year development and planning strategy for the Financial Year 2025/2026 to 2030. “Issues of indiscipline, absenteeism, shortage or theft of drugs in government hospitals are because of issues of private practice.
It’s not that we don’t recognise the role played by the private sector, but there should be regulations. “We are proposing that we have two licences, including one for registration as a public professional, and a licence for registration as a private practitioner so that there is a clear distinction between the two,” Dr Olaro told this publication in an interview. He added that in neighbouring countries, which he didn’t mention, for one to practice, they must have a duo licence and if found practising without a duo licence, you are de-registered. Dr Olaro says the new guidelines should also prescribe how far private facilities should be from government facilities.
“If you licence private facilities within a few metres from a government health facility, and in which the workers at the private one are health workers of that institution, it constitutes a conflict of interest,” said Dr Olaro. “How do we speak to facilities which are just 100 or 200 metres from a government facility? If some of you have visited Mityana Hospital, you will see that just a few metres from it, there is a pharmacy, and who are the owners of the pharmacy? The workers of Mityana Hospital. “And the person who is actually supposed to do procurement planning for the hospital is the owner of the pharmacy; so, you will find that the things patients need are not put in the procurement plan of the hospital and are only available in the pharmacy,” he added.
The government currently employs more than 11,000 allied health professionals, according to Dr Olaro; however, the profession has been infiltrated by quacks. Prof John Charles Okiria, the chairperson of AHPC, said key among the issues that are up for regulation in the new strategy is the elimination of quacks, who he said are treating people from their homes, among other areas, and are responsible for many delayed referrals and admissions. “We realised that there has been a gap in the provision of regulation and inspection that unqualified people have deceitfully provided services to people in the population, especially in rural areas, and people keep calling them “doctors” and yet they are not qualified.
“You cannot be able to provide a service for what you’ve not trained in, and yet the public, because of sometimes few failures in the government to provide all care, has resorted to going to these people because they have tended to be the first point of contact,” said Prof Okiria. Ms Irene Guloba, the manager of finance and administration at AHPC, said the Council is faced with several challenges, including inadequate and inappropriate office space and a lack of a data protection policy.
Conflict of interest
The Director General of Health Services, Dr Charles Olaro, calls for regulations on the private sector. ‘‘If some of you have visited Mityana Hospital, you will see that just a few metres from it, there is a pharmacy, and who are the owners of the pharmacy? The workers of Mityana Hospital,’’he says. Dr Olaro adds: ‘‘And the person who is actually supposed to do procurement planning for the hospital is the owner of the pharmacy; so, you will find that the things patients need are not put in the procurement plan of the hospital and are only available in the pharmacy.’’
