2011-2030 National Strategic Health Plan and National Health System
The Vice Minister of Health, Madalena Hanjam, in an interview to the radio program, “Goodbye Conflict Welcome Development”, transmitted in Portuguese, talked, among other issues, about the 2011-2030 National Strategic Health Plan and the National Health System in Timor-Leste.
The National Strategic Health Plan is a document that includes the strategies designed to combat the problems and challenges faced by the health sector. Simultaneously, it represents an adaptation of the National Health System, taking into account the country’s economic and social development, in a reformist and progressive perspective characterized by the consolidation of Peace and national stability.
This Plan is based on the principles of solidarity and sharing of responsibilities, in the equality of access and use of the services and in the ethics of defending human dignity. The Ministry of Health has the objective of achieving a “Healthy Timor-Leste”, were all Timorese access health services and were this is taken as a factor of global development in the fight against poverty. It is in this plan that we see established the measures, the responsibilities and the investments that the government should consider to improve the population’s state of health.
The 2011-2030 National Strategic Health Plan is implicit in the National Health System, as it should be, but it is more than that. The National Health System represents the set of independent elements that contribute for the health and wellbeing in the household, in the learning establishments, in work and public places, in the communities, and that influence the psychosocial environment.
This is the structure through which the resources and the technical capacity organize themselves, in order to render integrated health services, in sufficient quantities and with adequate quality, to answer the population’s needs at a compatible cost for the country.
In this way, the National Health System may be organized in a way that the population’s needs are satisfied in a way as efficient as possible, when possible, and for that it is necessary that health care services are well organized and the health units interact in a complementary way.
It is thus understandable that the health system should comprise 5 main elements: the configuration of the sanitary system, resource organization (human, material and financial), health care provided, financing and management.
