Only 6 doctors for 10 000 people
South Africa is lagging far behind its peers when it comes to producing doctors, a conference has heard.
|||Durban - The country is lagging far behind its peers when it comes to producing doctors, and it will take political will from the private and public healthcare sector to find a remedy.
Addressing delegates from different organisations in the healthcare sector at its annual conference in Cape Town on Tuesday, the Hospital Association of South Africa (Hasa) said the public and private sectors (healthcare) served the same population, and it was time to establish a working relationship.
“We have come to realise that we are all serving the same population, and our ideas need to converge on this issue. With just six doctors per 10 000 people versus a global average of 15, South Africa is well below its peers,” Medi-Clinic’s Dr Nkaki Matlala said.
He said about half of all doctors registered with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) were working outside the country.
Regulatory and bureaucratic forces limited the number of doctors to meet demand. As a result, doctors migrated out of the public sector into the private sector, and also overseas, Jonathan Lowick, of Life Healthcare, told the panel.
He said “draconian restrictions” on registering foreign doctors should be lifted and plans put in place for training more doctors and nurses.
“Just 1 409 doctors were trained in 2014 in eight state-run medical colleges, a small increase from the 1 229 trained in 2001. We should really look critically at our regulations and what they are doing to restrict training of doctors,” he said.
The shortage of specialists in the public sector was also raised by Dr Ramesh Bhoola, chair of Joint Medical Holdings. Bhoola said there was a severe shortage of training posts in the public sector for doctors who wanted to specialise in a number of fields.
“Local universities could collaborate with overseas universities and doctors could do their clinical work in South Africa. In this way we could easily increase the number of medical graduates,” he said.
A Durban orthopaedic surgeon and chairman of the SA Medical Association (Sama), Dr Mzukisi Grootboom, agreed with Matlala.
“It’s correct that we have just about six doctors per 10 000 compared with the global average ratio. We lack specialists right across the board. We need at least three medical schools to deal with the problem.
“In Addington Hospital, for example, we are still relying on the same apartheid structure which has to deal with a grown population compared to the past. All we need to do is to strengthen the public sector, and government has to play a stewardship role and lead the way,” he said.
Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi on Thursday said he addressed the conference and his department’s position was clear.
Commenting in New York at the 70th anniversary of the United Nations, Motsoaledi said: “The curative healthcare system, uncontrolled commercialism of the healthcare system and the fragmentation of the system are our main problems. We are saying the solution is the National Health Insurance (NHI). If the private sector can accept that, then we are together”.
He said the UN would next week adopt 17 sustainable goals for the world, one of which was that countries must adopt universal health coverage for their populations.
Motsoaledi said not only specialist doctors were in short supply. “There is a shortage of around 4 million health workers worldwide. Sub-Saharan Africa is most affected but at least South Africa is better off compared to her neighbouring countries,” he said.
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