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The Senior Health Surveillance Assistants (SHSAs) National Executive Committee has presented its grievances to the office of the Ombudsman to seek legal relief on its outstanding unpaid allowances case.
President of the network, Lewis Masiye, disclosed this at a media briefing in Lilongwe.
According to Masiye, for the past five years, SHSAs, a grouping of community health workers have been seeking justice on why they are not being given their top-up allowance of K62 thousand despite the treasury authorising the payment.
Documents seen by this publication indicate that the SHSAs were promoted in 2015 to grade L from M and their allowances were raised from K25 thousand to K62 thousand.
“We have followed all procedures but since 2017 we are not being assisted, we want the Ombudsman to help us,” Masiye said.
Secretary-General for the network in Malawi, Trizza Masauli, assured the government that they will continue to provide quality health care services whilst waiting for its response.
She said: “We will continue providing quality health services as we wait for the government to address our concerns.”
However, the SHSAs have given the government 21 days to respond to their grievances.
In his remarks, the Ministry of Health (MoH) Spokesperson, Adrian Chikumbe, said the Ministry is aware of the issue and has hailed the SHSAs for following all the procedures before asking the Ombudsman to intervene. He said their concerns will be addressed in the 2022-2023 fiscal year.
“Though not yet communicated by the Ombudsman we have already started addressing the matter with Treasury Department,” said Chikumbe.
The MoH has over 10 thousand HSAs and most of them operate from rural areas.
Source:MBC
