Health Ministry Between Policy and Process

The Selection of the Minister of Health in the New Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) cabinet, says a lot about how politics in our country works. There is no doubt that Dr. Taher Hawramy, is a well known surgeon with excellent teaching qualifications. However, it is much nicer to imagine him as a dean of a medical school or a president of a University, rather than the Minister of Health. I will tell you why in a minute. First lets take a look at the priorities of our government.
Over the last 18+ years of its life, the KRG preferred politics over professionalism, process over policy and geography over governance. Politically, the Ministry of Health has been and stayed a Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) territory in the previous cabinet and stayed so in the new one. That has to do with the strategic agreement between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and PUK rather than assigning the best person to the respective jobs in the government. The dirty policy of putting the nose of politics into every minute function of the government is so paralyzing for the latter. The experience of the last 18 years is a proof for that characterization. It is a disaster to continue this policy in the extremely crucial and vital area of health.
As for as governance goes, the KRG failed so far to prioritize health planning and policy development over the day to day process of how the functions of the Ministry are conducted. This is understandable given the failure of the Parliament of Kurdistan to pass a bill related to health policy. The only bill related to health passed by the former was a two pages law about the structure of the Ministry of Health and how it should be run. So in the absence of clear understanding of how this country is viewing health and health care, the logical outcome would be chaos when it is ran. What make matter even worse is the fact that people who are assigned to run the Ministry and not managers by training. They are just selected because they are "good" people, based on their clinical qualifications and their connections to the main two parties.
Dr. Hawramy spent most of his professional life doing surgeries. He has limited health policy and management credentials. That alone doesn’t qualify him to become the Minister of Health. The outcome would be a focus on the status quo way of doing things. So the forecast is not encouraging as far as policy making and planning for the health sector goes and we have to wait how the Minister will do on process. We need to develop a grading system for him to see if he fails or passes this test. Hope he does!