Free State health department should do its job, not attack the DA

The Free State health department is clearly still in a state of complete denial about the crisis it is facing. It is time that it stopped making excuses for failing the people of the province and got down to dealing with the problem.

In his statement responding to the DA's claim that three hospitals in the province were operating without doctors, Free State health spokesman Jabu Mbalula said this claim was untrue as the hospitals were serviced by "sessional and community service" doctors. This is a devious evasion for a number of reasons.

Firstly, community service doctors have only recently finished studying and they are not supposed to be working without supervision. Clearly they are doing so, however, which puts patients' lives at risk. If these hospitals are being visited by sessional doctors, then it will be for only a few hours a week. Community service and sessional doctors do not compensate for full-time doctors and are an emergency solution to a problem that needs a long-term solution.

Secondly, by focusing on hospitals with no doctors at all, he ignores the fact that the crisis extends across the entire province:

• There is not a single hospital that has managed to fill all of its posts for doctors or for nurses.
• More than half (16 out of 31) of the provinces' hospitals have managed to fill only a third or less of the available doctors' posts.  

This creates situations where, for example, on a recent oversight visit the DA conducted to the Pelonomi Hospital, we found that there was a single doctor working in the ARV clinic, which has 5000 patients on its records, and desperately ill patients often have to be turned away.

While Mbalula dismisses the problem of hospitals without doctors as one affecting rural hospitals only, the fact is that Pelonomi Hospital, located in Bloemfontein, has only 20 of the 64 doctors it should have.

It is unfortunate that the Free State health department is more willing to engage in disputes with the opposition than face its problems head-on.   

Statement issued by Mike Waters, MP, Democratic Alliance shadow minister of health, October 2 2009

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