The Minister of Health and Social Protection, Amine Tahraoui, addressed several crucial issues related to the health sector, including the migration of health professionals, the improvement of working conditions in hospitals and the issue of ruptures of medicines. During his speech before the Committee on Education and Cultural and Social Affairs in the House of Advisors, he underlined the importance of reforms to make the sector more attractive and guarantee better management of resources.
The migration of health professionals abroad is a major problem with multiple causes, Minister of Health and Social Protection Amine Tahraoui said on Wednesday. “We cannot enact a law to prevent health professionals from migrating to other countries, but we can count on some of them returning later, after having accumulated enough experience abroad , so that the Kingdom can benefit from their contributions and contribute to the development of the health sector”he said.
The minister, who interacted with the advisers of the Committee on Education and Cultural and Social Affairs, in the Second Chamber, promised, to remedy this problem, to develop new measures aimed at improving working conditions and to rehabilitate infrastructures intensively in order to bring them into compliance with international standards, noting for example that the Mohammed VI University Hospital of Tangier or that of Agadir currently under construction offer an environment conducive to work and have equipment for tip that gives all professionals the possibility of working in a modern framework which is perhaps better than that of countries that we consider developed.
The government official assured that more efforts will be made to bring about legal reforms, particularly with regard to career management in the health sector and improving the level of services provided in university hospitals and hospitals in general, adding that new decisions taken in this direction are about to take effect, which will play an important role in improving the attractiveness of jobs in the health sector.
Furthermore, with regard to the prices of medicines, the minister reiterated what he had explained a few weeks ago before the social sectors committee of the House of Representatives, namely that the manufacturing margin and the margins beneficiaries of the pharmacist and the distributor are a determining factor in the sale price of medicines to the citizen, emphasizing that “the solution is to encourage local manufacturing, particularly for generics”.
And Mr. Tahraoui continued that the prices of medicines are not in line with the purchasing power of citizens, recalling the exemption of pharmaceutical products and all medicines, as well as the raw materials which go into their composition, from the value added tax, reduced to 0% instead of 7%, under the 2024 finance law. A measure, he noted, which had an impact on the prices of around 4,500 medicines original and generic.
Concerning the shortage of certain medicines, the Minister of Health and Social Protection stressed that “this is often linked to causes external to the ministry, the main one being their breakdown in foreign countries where they are manufactured”before mentioning a factor relating to the absence of generic medicines produced in Morocco. Despite this, the government official assured that the department “deploys efforts to meet the needs of health establishments through the legal regulation of this area, as well as through joint actions with the Ministry of Economy and Finance”.
Regarding the management of the stock of medicines, this is part of the national strategy for the procurement and distribution of medicines and medical supplies, which has been accompanied by a series of measures, including the increase in the budget allocated to medicines, and the increase in public orders for the purchase of medicines which are subject to interruptions, he said.
Mr. Tahraoui also indicated that he is counting on the information systems available to the government authority concerning the distribution of medicines at the national level, emphasizing the importance of these systems to ensure the balance of the distribution of medicines at the national level.
