The Hon. (Dr.) Janaka Senarathna

¶ 01 Hon. Presiding Member, it has been ten and a half years since the NMRA Act, No. 5 of 2015 (enacted on 19 March 2015). The Act’s objectives include ensuring medicines, devices, and borderline products are available to the public at fair prices, and providing for registration, licensing, cancellation, price-fixing, import, manufacture, etc.

¶ 02 Despite this, we have yet to fully realize those objectives. WHO’s 2018 “100 Core Health Indicators” outlines Inputs/Processes, Outputs, Outcomes, and Impacts. We often highlight Impact indicators like maternal, infant, and neonatal mortality, but Inputs are foundational: health financing, workforce, infrastructure, and information/governance.

¶ 03 On workforce: nurse training schools were closed and recruitment paused for 4–5 years; now we are recruiting thousands. On infrastructure: facility density and distribution need strengthening. The Ministry is rolling out Primary Medical Care Units (PMCUs); five pilot PMCUs were launched across five districts, including at Aththoya in Ratnapura. With stronger inputs, we can achieve better outputs, outcomes, and impacts.

¶ 04 Financial risk protection and catastrophic health expenditure, as explained by Hon. Dr. Nihal Abeysinghe, are critical. When more than 10% of total household spending, or over 40% of non-food expenditure, goes to health, families risk impoverishment.

¶ 05 We must therefore sustain financing, workforce, and infrastructure upgrades while implementing the NMRA pricing framework to protect households and ensure access.