SA hospitals are flatlining

CRISIS: PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE HAEMORRHAGING SPECIALIST DOCTORS, CRITICAL STAFF

- Masoka Dube

MAKING THE CUT. Surgeons carry out an operation. Their ability to practice is being hampered by their working conditions.

(Picture: iStock)

If the department of health does not create a conducive working environment, specialist doctors and other practitioners will keep on moving to the private sector, say experts.

And the exodus could affect the National Health Insurance (NHI), medical experts have warned.

The experts were commenting on recent reports that specialist doctors were continuing to resign from the government hospitals to join the private sector.

Statistics from the national department of health revealed that between 2013 and this year, it lost about 12 745 doctors.

It further revealed 58897 nurses, 1341 pharmacists and 23941 administrative personnel resigned during the same period.

Health expert Dr Atiya Mosam said the escalating resignation of specialist doctors from the public health sector was a warning of a system under strain, driven by frozen posts, austerity measures and increasingly heavier workloads for junior staff and specialists that remain in the system.

Mosam said this threatens the quality of care, worsens inequities between the public and private sectors and undermines clinical supervision and specialist training.

“The NHI depends on a functional public health system with adequate specialist capacity to support referral pathways, clinical governance and continuity of care, and this crisis underscores the urgent need to strengthen primary health care (PHC) as weaknesses in PHC means that many patients are reaching specialists for conditions that should have been prevented, detected earlier, or managed at PHC level, unnecessarily overburdening specialist services,” said Mosam.