TIRANA – A plan worth 97,393,88USD seeking to support five pillars of Albania which identifies 113 priority actions has been announced by the UN Local Team in Albania.
It is a socio-economic response and recovery plan for coronavirus in this Balkan country for the next 12-18 months called the ‘UN Recovery and Response Plan’, local media quoted UN official sources as saying.
The 5 pillars of the government support include health response and systems strengthening, pro-poor social systems, resilient economies, macro-economic and fiscal management, and social cohesion and community resilience.
The support in the health sector comes when the public spending in this field as a share of GDP is lower in Albania than in most South Eastern European countries. According to the latest UN report about Covid-19 response, this trend will continue further into 2022, decreasing to 2.94 percent from the current 2.97 percent share which is happening against the background of C19 pandemic.
“WHO projection for 2020–2022 shows that Albania will spend for the next three years less than 10 percent on health from the overall public money. The decline in the resources to primary care is concerning. The strategy on the development of primary care in Albania calls for an increased budget to 25 percent,” the report reads.
In the meantime the report points out that a number of public health services have been affected during the coronavirus lockdown; all services were suspended except emergency and follow-up/treatment for certain categories of patients and contacts of health personnel with patients was minimized. In late June, the University Medical Center in Tirana witnessed an outbreak of coronavirus cases which led to further limitations in the provision of these services, including screening and treatment of cancer patients.
Furthermore, the allocation of existing budget health programs to Covid-19 activities will have long-lasting effects, as this has led to what the UN report calls ‘loss’, due to “missed diagnosis, missed prevention, missed treatment, missed gain of healthy life years.”
As it has been witnessed there are a few days that the so called ‘family doctor’ is mentioned as an active part in face of coronavirus by senior government officials, and the question remains answered what 1,600 ‘family doctors’ did and were paid for before.
In the meantime a senior official of the Democratic Party (DP) said on Friday that there is an increase of 230,000 more poor people due to misgovernment and corruption referring to an UNDP report. According to Jorida Tabaku, a former DP deputy, Albania is moving toward a two-fold growth of the poor. “UNDP predicts that this figure will increase by 230,000 more poor people in the country,” Tabaku said. /argumentum.al
