Dr. Diana Atwine, Director State House Medicine and Health Service Delivery Monitoring Unit, on Health Workers’ Salary Payments, 3rd March 2014 * Those affected please call toll free line 0800100447 or send text 8200 On Friday evening, the shadow minister for Health, Hon. Lulume Bayiga, made a statement on NTV, about non-payment of health workers which he had just been informed about. This information was not new to Government; in fact the process to rectify the problem had already begun. From November, monitoring units started registering complaints of non payment of salaries, underpayment, deletion from the payroll and lack of access to payroll of health workers. The problem escalated in December 2013 and January 2014. The monitoring unit undertook establishing the magnitude of the problem. By 24th of January 2014, we had obtained information from 51 districts and about 5,585 workers were identified as having been affected. This number was only half of the country since data was obtained from half the number of the districts in Uganda. The salary issues were raised to the President, who in turn directed the Minister for Economic Monitoring under the Office of the President to work with Monitoring unit and the ministries concerned to ensure that the affected workers issues are resolved immediately. Thereafter, there was an inter-ministerial meeting between, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Public Service, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Local Government and Ministry of the Prresidency, after which, an inter- Ministerial taskforce was instituted to undertake the task at hand. On 23th of January 2014, the taskforce held its first meeting and the Director Monitoring Unit was the Chairperson. Since then, the taskforce has been meeting weekly to identify and resolve the problems expeditiously. The first task handled, was to issue a press release that ran in New Vision, NTV, UBC reminding all accounting officers to submit all information regarding cases of payment of salaries by 7th of February 2014. In addition, calls were made and letters were sent as reminder to all accounting officers. The taskforce identified the gaps in the implementation of integrated payroll and pension system, for example, understaffing and slow response of accounting officers to send workers information to public service in time among others. Ministry of health offered 10 staff members to help public service clear the back log. Since then, the taskforce has been working with the technical team of Public service to ensure that all issues of salaries are resolved. Among the issues that have been handled, promotions with pending arrears and allowances, transfers that were made but could not access payroll, reactivation of workers that had been erroneously deleted, new recruits have been helped to access the payroll in all the districts. In addition, deletions have been made of duplicate records of workers, Retirees and correction of bank account details for the affected civil servants. Another matter of concern was the number of people denied payment due to incomplete information submitted by the district leadership. In conclusion, we would like to thank the affected people for their patience and to assure them that over 90 per cent were paid in February 2014 and call upon all concerned district officers to submit complete information of their workers. We still call upon the affected people to contact us in case of any salary issues on our toll free line:0800100447 or send us a message on 8200.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 10:55:56 +0000
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