DA unveils healthcare proposals

2008-11-26 14:28

Cape Town - The DA unveiled a number of proposals on Wednesday aimed at improving health care and ensuring availability of medicines and health professionals.

International experience showed the most effective health care delivery model to be a partnership between the state and private sector, DA spokesperson Mike Waters told a media briefing to launch the party's health policy document.

Under a DA government, a first priority would be to open up a tender process for managing those hospitals not delivering according to required standards.

This tender process would be open to any group of individuals in the public or the private sector able to meet the requirements, including a proven track record in hospital management.

Anyone awarded a tender to manage a public hospital would be funded by the state on a per-patient basis for providing health care, and rigorous performance criteria would be applied to ensure quality.

Decentralised

This would go hand in hand with a more decentralised model of health care administration, which would give hospital managers the powers they currently lacked to manage their hospitals effectively, he said.

Two key responsibilities for the state in terms of the DA's plans would be ensuring the availability of medicines and a supply of enough doctors and nurses to meet demands.

The DA proposed that the state involve pharmacies in a more grass-roots system for distributing medicines, so that patients at state hospitals were able to collect their medicines directly from their local pharmacy rather than waiting days or hours in a queue at a state hospital.

Waters said the critical shortage of medical professionals should be confronted head-on with a dynamic campaign to both increase the number of doctors and nurses available to the health system and make conditions attractive enough to ensure they stayed.

Among other things, the DA proposed a system whereby doctors in the private sector conducted a certain number of hours of pro bono work in the public sector every year, as some lawyers were currently required to do.

"We also propose a SADC [Southern African Development Community] health workers' protocol, to allow for the ethical recruitment of health staff from neighbouring countries, an international recruitment drive, and the classification of health worker skills as scarce skills to increase the number of foreign-qualified doctors and nurses we are able to employ."

These steps would go hand in hand with measures, such as an adequate referral network, exchange programmes with hospitals in other countries and minimum standards for all hospitals, to make conditions in the public sector more appealing.

The shortage of doctors should further be addressed by creating space for privately run medical schools to increase the number of doctors being trained, Waters said.

Special attention should also be devoted to the major health challenges, and in particular HIV/Aids and tuberculosis.

Both required a properly co-ordinated treatment response as well as more concerted efforts to help families of the infected to cope, to care for the orphans of these plagues, and protect health workers from infection, he said.

- SAPA