The SA health regulator says it has appealed to the Treasury for an increase in its funding for the 2022/2023 financial year as it deals with a backlog of medical applications and staff shortages, which is negatively affecting its efficiency.
Finance minister Enoch Godongwana tables the budget on Wednesday.
The SA Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra) has not been immune to the Treasury’s budget cuts across all government departments in recent years as the state reins in public spending as part of its plans for fiscal consolidation.
The budget cuts coincided with the outbreak of Covid-19, which brought with it added challenges for the struggling health regulator. This includes evaluating a number of applications for emergency use of Covid-19 vaccines. Sahpra has authorised the use of five Covid-19 vaccines: AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer-BioNTech, Sinovac and Sinopharm, with the regulator announcing on Friday that Pfizer has applied for the authorisation of the vaccines for children aged five to 11.
Sahpra has also recently authorised pharmaceutical manufacturer MSD to import its coronavirus pill molnupiravir for the emergency-use treatment of people who are at high risk of contracting Covid-19.
Without revealing the amount Sahpra has requested from the Treasury, CEO Boitumelo Semete-Makokotlela said: “For the amount of [medical] applications we have, we are just not adequately capacitated.
“Our most recent fit-for-purpose structure has a headcount of close to 500 [employees], with the bulk of it being highly technical skills that we need. At the moment we are sitting at about 270-odd people we’ve employed,” Semete-Makokotlela said.
The entity is partially dependent on the department of health for continued funding of operations with the bulk of its funding generated from fees from pharmaceutical companies. This is, however, not ideal because over-reliance on fees instead of the government for funding could compromise its independence as a public entity, Semete-Makokotlela said.
“We are funded by government, then we raise funding through the fees that we charge, but as a regulator, you don’t want to be dependent on fees because you need to maintain that autonomy. The minute you are dependent on fees it skews your objectives to an extent,” she says.
“The little bit of money we have goes to pay for support functions, so as we are being established … [the government should] allow us some breathing space where you really invest in us as a regulator then as we become more efficient. But we will always need to be funded because we are a [public] entity.”
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