Pretoria - Employing more doctors should be unquestionable in a country where state hospitals are plagued by structural inefficiencies, gross under-staffing, and numerous complaints of poor service delivery by the communities they serve.
It was for this reason that the South African Medical Association Trade Union (Samatu), alongside the Young Nurses Indaba Trade Union (YNITU) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) took the plight of unemployed community doctors to the doorstep of the National Health Department in Thaba Tshwane.
Dr Cedric Sihlangu, general-secretary of Samatu, said it was a tragedy that the country had over 1 000 doctors who were sitting at home, with no prospects of securing employment.
Sihlangu said considering that the government had a constitutional responsibility to ensure healthcare was provided to the population, it was not proper for communities to be stuck with hospitals and clinics that have no doctors.
Trade Unions Samatu, Cosatu and YNITU protest outside the Department of Health in Thaba Tshwane calling for the absorption of unemployed community doctors. #Protest #Doctors @HealthZA @GautengHealth #Health #Medica pic.twitter.com/DEYL1jWMYh
— Pretoria News (@pretorianews) January 26, 2023
"So when you go to a hospital you are not being attended to by a doctor meaning your chances of dying are quite high."
Sihlangu said the painful part about what was happening in public facilities was that the same people who were presiding over the healthcare systems themselves relied on private healthcare as they had medical aid.
"So when they need to be checked they go to private hospitals and there they are guaranteed to see a doctor. In fact, they see specialists if they get a headache they get sent to see a neurologist, for chest pains they see a cardiologist."
"However our people on the ground, who are the poor and marginalised, when they have to consult they have to wait five hours to see a doctor but more often than not there are none.
Sihlangu said this march was in actual fact more about the poor and marginalised, and about raising issues affecting our communities in which the government was failing and something had to be done.
Zingiswa Losi, the president of Cosatu, said the party had decided to join in solidarity with Samatu and community doctors due to the number of cases they were finding within the healthcare system themselves.
Losi said they had called for National Health Insurance to be implemented which the government had agreed to but in the absence of having enough medical professionals in hospitals national healthcare becomes a dream that was simply sitting in the pipeline.
She said Covid-19 also showed the country how doctors were appreciated but also acknowledged the conditions they were working under.
"We cannot have a country of over 50 million population and you have one doctor per 1 000 people. We support the call made by doctors for government to fill all funded posts but also to ensure there is no hospital that is not blended with specialists."
Losi said this was crucial as coming from the Covid-19 pandemic, people in South Africa had chronic illnesses, and mothers who gave birth to children with special needs.
"We have doctors that have gone to school and spent seven years studying to be able to bring what they learned back to society and the only thing they are asking for is to be absorbed by the system and assist South Africa in the health crisis we are in."
She added: "We can't have a country that is going to move forward when we have doctors that are leaving not because they are looking for greener pastures but because they want to be able to work and practice. We can't have a brain drain while people are sitting at home."
Pretoria News