President Uhuru Kenyatta called for the utilization of knowledge gained from the global and national response to Covid-19 in the roll-out of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in the country.
The President said UHC, which is one of the Government’s Big 4 development agenda, should be structured to promote preventive medicine.
“Pre-mortem analysis will help us chart the path to sustainable health provisioning for all. Using this model, the conference should, therefore, give us counsel on how to promote preventive medicine over symptomatic care.
“It should guide us on how to use the lessons learnt from the Covid-19 experience in order to anchor the full national roll-out of the Universal Health Coverage,” the President said.
The Head of State spoke Monday morning at State House, Nairobi when he opened a Covid-19 virtual conference organised by the Council of Governors on building resilience to deal with future pandemics.
To achieve resilience to the current Covid-19 and future health challenges, the President called for a shift from tactical responses to more long-term strategic approaches.
“We must move away from tactical response to this pandemic, to strategic response. Instead of symptomatic reactions to this crisis, we must move to structural reactions that are long-term and transformative.
“And this is what I call positive resilience – being able to anticipate the patterns of this pandemic, responding to it transformatively and ’building-back’ better,” the President told the meeting attended by Deputy President Dr William Ruto and, Cabinet Secretaries Eugene Wamalwa (Devolution) and Mutahi Kagwe (Health).
As stakeholders harness lessons from the six-month fight against Covid-19 and as the curve of infections in the country begin to flatten, the President called for caution saying the focus should remain victory against the killer virus.
“But as we implement best practices after the counsel of this conference, our shared goal must also remain in sight. And this goal is simple: Victory over Covid-19 and nothing less. We must achieve it at zero option,” he said.
In their opening remarks, Health CS Mutahi Kagwe said the infrastructure set up to respond to Coronavirus was a major boost to the country’s UHC agenda while Devolution CS Eugene Wamalwa hailed the excellent inter-governmental relations exhibited during the Covid-19 period.
