The opening address by the department of health at the Cape Town ACEW in South
Africa on November 8, 1999 highlighted the following:
The level of health service delivery has not notably improved in spite of considerable
investment in importing new technologies and the operational expense of supporting
these technologies. For example, the lack of equipment maintenance and repair is a
major barrier to providing effective care, and stems from poor planning and acquisition
and procurement. The most important intervention is ensuring a stable supply of competent technology managers. It is the desire of the department of health that the workshop teach decision makers and planners to deal with complex issues of planning, life
cycle, transfer, management, and utilization of health technology, so that organized plans
for education, training, and placement of HTM professionals can be developed. This
workshop is intended to impart skills to the HTM community to ensure and enhance the
safety of health technologies and facilities. HTM is one of the major expenses in our
health care system within the area of resource mobilization. The broad framework for
comprehensive health care technology (HT) policies has been created. An HT system
composed of acquisition, management, planning, and assessment as subsystems is top
priority. The major short-term strategic action is a comprehensive national HT audit.
Another action is field testing of the Essential Health Technology Package (EHTP) software. The results of these two actions will determine the level of government intervention required