Question NW168 to the Minister of Health

Reply:

1. Strategies for addressing severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in young children include:

• Routine implementation of evidence-based interventions aimed at the prevention, early identification and treatment of SAM, namely promotion of breastfeeding and complementary feeding, growth monitoring and promotion, active case finding and provision of specialised formulated therapeutic foods to promote catch-up growth.
• Scaling up of community-based screening for acute malnutrition including involving caregivers at household level to improve early detection.
• Inclusion of SAM case management in all relevant guidelines including the Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI), the Integrated Management of Acute Malnutrition (IMAM) and the Essential Medicine List (EML) Standard Treatment Guidelines at primary health care and hospital levels.
• Continuous capacity building of frontline staff in the management of children with severe acute malnutrition at high risk of death.
• Improved clinical governance through monthly death reviews and clinical audits to identify and address modifiable factors at hospital level.
• Data verification and use of data for action at all levels of care.
• Implementation of targeted operational plans based on malnutrition bottleneck analyses conducted in selected districts.
• Community health workers conduct tracing and tracking of all discharged children with severe acute malnutrition as part of follow-up care and support.

2. Yes. The Department of Health continues to work in collaboration with other sectors across all levels to address food insecurity, malnutrition and hunger through implementation of the National and Provincial Food and Nutrition Security plans. The key objectives of these plans include:

• Establishment of inclusive local food value chains to support access to nutritious, affordable foods (led by the Department of Agriculture).
• Expand targeted social protection measures and sustainable livelihood programmes (led by the Department of Social Development)
• Scale-up of high impact nutrition interventions targeting women, infants and children (led by the Department of Health)
• Influence people across the life-cycle to make informed food and nutrition decisions through an integrated communications strategy.
• Develop a monitoring and evaluation system for Food and Nutrition Security in South Africa and establish an integrated risk management system for monitoring related risks (led by the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation and Statistics South Africa).
• Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurial skills development (led by the Department of Small Business Development).

END.