Nominated MCA Farida Salim has expressed her disappointment with governor Jack Ranguma for slashing the county Health budget.
According to the County Fiscal Strategy Paper 2016, Ranguma will slash the Health budget from 30.8 per cent in the current financial year (2015/2016) to 28.9 in the next financial year.
Ms Salim claimed much of the Health budgetary allocation has been going to recurrent expenditure and therefore it needed to be raised even more to cater for development.
Salim said currently, the county government is planning to build new health facilities, but stressed that they will remain white elephants if they are not stocked or equipped due to lack of enough funds from the county government to the health docket.
“Many other programmes such as remuneration of community health workers that we passed in the Assembly will be affected when the health budget is slashed,” said Salim who is also the vice chair of the Health Committee in the Assembly.
Salim added that there was a recommendation by the Assembly that every health facility in Kisumu to have a maternity wing stating that all these will not be achieved when the health budget is slashed.
“We recommended maternity wings to curb high maternal mortality rate. For a county to be productive we must have a healthy workforce thus we must invest more on health,”she said, adding that her committee will not allow the slashing of the health budget.