Govt Inaugurates Medical & Dental Practitioners Council 

By Damba Rogers                                   

The health ministry has today inaugurated a five man board of members for the Uganda medical and dental practitioner’s council chaired by Dr. Joel Okullo.

The council that is mandated with monitoring and regulating to ensure quality among the medical fraternity is being tasked by the state minister for health, Sara Opendi to work on ensuring that training institutions always churn out quality health practitioners for the nation as well as crack down on the quack health practitioners around the country to save the nation from increased health problems arising from unqualified health medics. Ministry confirms forwarding details of the health professions authority bill to the finance ministry to be certified with a certification of financial implication before taking it to the next level.

The principals in the bill seek to provide more guidelines on how health profession and governing bodies are managed and at the same time have these different bodies merged under this authority that the bill if passed into law seeks to create.

According to the state minister for health, Sarah Opendi they expect to receive the certificate from the finance ministry in the next three months.

She further states that it’s the regional medical council that pushed Uganda to come up with the bill that will be used by the EAC member states to harmonize the health and medical governing bodies.

Uganda has a number of medical governing bodies among them being the Uganda nurses and midwives council, Uganda medical and dental practitioners council, the allied health professions council, pharmacy council.

The newly appointed board chairman of the medical and dental practitioners council, Dr. Joel Okullo who accepted to take on the task raised serious issues affecting the fraternity among them being quality medical and health schools growing up in the country, toothless regulatory bodies, insufficient funding to execute council duties.

He further asks the health ministry to start giving a single exam to all medical students across all institutes to ensure quality checks among the students being graduated to the medical sector.

Among the members on the board include, Prof. Sarah Kiguli, Dr. Ntwatwa Lule, Dr. Katumba Julius among others.

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