Guyana records astounding HIV spending in 2016

Aug 05, 2018 News

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Ever since international funding for HIV started to dwindle, Guyana has been taking seriously its responsibility to maintain the gains made over the years. Moreover, in 2016 alone, Guyana’s spending in HIV reflected an astronomical hike in disbursement.
This astounding development was highlighted Friday at a multipartite National Health Accounts [NHA] Dissemination meeting held in Georgetown at the Cara Lodge on Quamina Street.
Commenting on government’s commitment to combat the dreaded disease, Ms. Julia Henn, Director, Health and HIV/AIDS Office within USAID/Eastern and Southern Caribbean, said that the increased expenditure from 25 percent in 2015 to 64 percent in 2016 is simply “mind-boggling”.
Guyana, like a number of other countries, has been stepping up to the challenge in the face of declining global support for health care. The strong reply to dips in international backing to combat the deadly disease is also needed “for adequate and continuous funding to achieve HIV targets and objectives in the face of additional funding cuts from the Global Fund to fight AIDS,” a document circulated at Friday’s meeting outlined.
It said too that “increased budgetary spending by the State also supports the Guyana government’s commitment to implement a ‘Treat All’ approach among its menu of measures to combat the HIV/AIDS deadly disease.”
“It is critical for the country to develop a credible long-term financing scenario that includes efforts to diversify funding sources and optimise resource utilization,” the document states.
Increase in spending in the public health sector is an overall pattern in the social services by the government which is taking the lead in the HIV/AIDS fight, according to government statistics. The data disclosed at the forum revealed that State spending for the HIV/AIDS stands at 62 percent while funding from the country’s international partners is 35 percent. Additionally, donations from other sources amount to three percent.
At the meeting it was also found that Guyana is also doing exceptionally well when expenditures were disaggregated by type. According to official figures, the country is spending 52 percent of allocations in the HIV/AIDS fight on preventative care, while 21 percent of the sum targets curative care. Administrative costs are calculated at 25 percent while ‘capital’ and ‘other’ account for one percent of the estimates in that sub-sector.
When she addressed the forum, Dr. Karen Cummings, Minister within the Public Health Ministry, said, “Guyana’s Health Accounts will play a pivotal role in national health care policy. It will also serve as a base from which sub-accounts of expenditures useful to decision-makers can be crafted. Our health accounts will serve as a base from which projections of health expenditures can be modelled.”
Reminding the audience that the public health care system is not static, Dr. Cummings said “the NHA must be periodically re-examined to determine the extent or scope of public health care, and to ensure that the best concepts, data sources, and methods are being captured.”
The recent meeting was also attended by PAHO/WHO Guyana Representative, Dr. William Adu-Krow, who noted that the NHA is a “useful monitoring and evaluation [M&E] tool” when reliable and timely data are available to ensure planning for proper spending to take place.
“One cannot manage what one cannot measure,” Dr Adu-Krow said.
After 17 years of trying, Guyana has finally joined Mexico and Nicaragua [pioneering States in the Health Accounts field] and several Caribbean countries to utilise the strategy, related Ms. Karen Yaw, the Director of Planning within the Public Health sector during an overview.
Nevertheless, “Guyana is off to a great start,” Mr. Tesfaye Dereje of the USAID Health Financing Governance project told participants.
Guyana’s NHA is built on three planks: revenue raising, managing resources and purchasing of services.
According to the document circulated at the meeting, Guyana is “undergoing an epidemiological transition from communicable… to non-communicable diseases [NCDs] and for some time it will continue to face this double burden of disease”.
As part of its recommendations, those who worked on the NHA initiative recommended the country allocate more funding to disease prevention since figures show that only 19 percent total health expenditure focus on this critical area.
The team in one of its five recommendations cited a bigger role in healthcare for the country’s private sector which contributes a mere 13 percent of total health expenditures, with nine percent coming from households and four percent from the companies.
“The private sector spending is relatively low in comparison with that of other countries with similar Gross Domestic Product [GDP] per capita,” the recommendation noted citing the meagre contribution as “an opportunity to diversify the source of funds for health and strengthen private sector involvement.”
But according to Yaw, the strategy is sufficiently adaptable to fit the peculiarities of the emerging Guyanese public health sector. Minister Cummings added too, the country must, “strategically utilise the information to promote better and targeted investments for the improvement of public health outcomes for all Guyanese.”

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