It gives me great pleasure to attend the launch of this most important initiative. Not only for itself, but as a symbol of the kind of delivery we want and expect in our Home for All.

Indeed, I am told that this Treatment Centre is the first of its kind in our Province and that it will serve as a model for the integrated healthcare and ARV treatment centres in the Western Cape.

In our Easter targets, we set our objectives for a Healthy Home for All. In this initiative, our Health department tells me that we are adding a number of important milestones to our delivery of health services.

Today, according to the Minister, you have exceeded our target of providing ARV treatment in our province. We set a goal of 6000 patients; we now reach 6660 throughout the Western Cape.

In terms of the other targets, I am happy to report that the Health services are well on their way.

We promised to improve service delivery through the appointment of doctors, nurses and pharmacists at 15 Community Health Care Centres. We now have an additional 33 doctors, 24 pharmacists and 55 nurses. We have prioritised five of the most common diseases: diabetes, hypertension, asthma, epilepsy and TB. In doing so, we have ensured the delivery of essential medicine supplies to all 15 facilities.

There are now 15 health facility managers at Community Health Centres in the Metro who will ensure the efficient coordination of services. These Centres are, in terms of another target, computerised and networked.

We undertook to improve patient flow at 6 Community Health Centres by means of proper signage and speeding up queuing. As you can see, the signage in this Centre is in three languages.

We have also reduced waiting times in the 15 health care facilities by improving queue management, the supply of medicines and, most importantly, by stepping up the professional/patient ratio considerably.

The final target, of course, relates to the launch of the first dedicated ARV clinic. And here we stand today, in this important symbol of a healthy home for all.

This clinic, and indeed the entire ARV treatment programme, is critical. We need to understand that HIV and Aids are not only putting an additional burden on those who care for them; they impact on development in our province, now calculated as a slowing down of 1% of our GDP.

This means that it is not only a health department issue, but must be dealt with in terms of intra-provincial measures. I am happy to be able to say that each department in our province now has an Aids strategy; each contributes a portion of their budget to combating the impact of Aids within their own line functions.

This interdepartmental cooperation is greatly enhanced by our financing strategy. That is, from national conditional funds, provincial funds that have been 'earmarked' and the generous Global Fund grant. For example, the Global Fund will pay for all drug and laboratory testing at this Centre.

So I want to say a very big thank you to the Global Fund for your important contribution.

I would also like to thank Crusaid, to whom this project owes so much. And to the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre, which has helped this project meet its staffing needs.

Aids takes its toll on a community in a variety of ways. By disabling the family breadwinner, it puts families into crisis. Where its effects and transmission are misunderstood, it may strike fear in a community, further endangering a patient's ability to survive. Its social effects are well documented in Yesterday - the story of one family ostracised and far from help. In this film, we see Leliti Khumalo walking the long road to the clinic, only to be turned away because the queue is too long and it has only one doctor. We see her rejection by a community whose fears are so overwhelming that they drive the family into isolation.

If we are to build social capital in our communities and in our province, we need to act with speed, energy and determination. ARV treatment is part of the regime. We need to understand its opportunities to extend the capacity and lives of Aids sufferers. We need psycho-social support for patients and their families. We need to help families through grants and other services. We need to help communities build up the confidence and knowledge to respond to the problems in their midst. We need to make the broader public aware that investing in the healthcare service is an investment for the entire province.

This is what we mean when we talk about a Home for All. In a home, the suffering of one family member impacts on the lives of the other members. In a home, we care for and protect everybody. In a home, we understand how the well-being of each family member influences the well-being of the whole.

This is the spirit and commitment we need to build in the Western Cape. We cannot exist as ghetto communities, ignoring the needs of others. Our communities cannot be islands, "sufficient unto themselves". Nor can we afford to be ignorant of the inter-connectedness of our lives. We depend on and need each other.

And every deposit we make in our social capital account is an investment in humanity, an investment in dignity and an investment in security.