Reducing the number of public hospitals and redirecting the health budget to other hospitals would help address the myriad challenges faced by the health department.
This is a belief of an advocacy health group concerned about the plethora of challenges faced by the public institutions.
The Dispatch reported last week about shortages of critical staff, equipment, surgical consumables and even food at medical facilities, while the department has also been crippled by endless medico-legal claims amounting to billions of rand.
Some hospitals are in need of consumables such as syringe needles, nappies, nebuliser masks, adult oxygen masks, oxygen regulators, special plasters, gloves, sutures, linen and beds.
Russell Rensburg, of the Rural Health Advocacy Group, said they were aware of plans in place on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the department’s functioning but the department needed a long-term plan.
“We need to start asking questions on [the] long-term plans of the healthcare system in the Eastern Cape.
“One of those questions is to look at how they improve the service capacity. Another question is whether we really need 91 hospitals in the Eastern Cape?
“Many of those hospitals aren’t functional half of the time. Some of them have only about 25 beds.
“When you have these 91 hospitals you have to spread the budget across all the hospitals. Instead of having more hospitals with less strength, how about less hospitals which are stronger, like the Western Cape for instance,” Rensburg said.
Rensburg said unpaid invoices lead to suppliers cutting off supply, which had a ripple effect on the running of the hospital.
The Dispatch reported last week that the recent National Treasury report on the late payment of suppliers revealed that the Eastern Cape — and the health department, in particular — was the worst culprit.
The report revealed more than 73,440 unpaid invoices in the province were older than 30 days by the end of the 2023/2024 financial year.
By the end of March, a whopping R4.5bn was outstanding.
These unpaid invoices were among 113,481 bills, amounting to more than R10.6bn, which had yet to be paid to government suppliers across the country.
.
Rensburg said he had not raised their assertion with the department but said the department in the previous term presented a service optimisation plan.
He said the plan was to shift capacity to larger hospitals.
Rensburg said: “So, the current problem is budgetary but if they don’t address it, in the long term the expenses will keep on being problematic.”
“We can’t think around from crisis to crisis, we need a plan, with a new MEC and administration. We need the political leadership to support the administration to make the difficult decisions they need to make.”
“The health department is one of the departments that get a huge chunk in bucket allocation. If they are spending a big portion of that, up to 10% on fixing medical legal claims, having salary increases across the system, right and they’re not finding efficiency or better ways to operate, this crisis will keep happening,” Rensburg said.
“It is not an easy decision to make, but those are the sort of decisions that need to be made.
“The question is, are we spending money in the right place?
“We really need to figure out a way to reduce the number hospitals without affecting service capacity and then improving services with a revitalised platform,” he said.
Rensburg said the department should be looking at improving medicine availability at clinics, improving clinics in totality and focus on reducing levels of maternal mortality.
“If you look at the district health stats on public health capacity, we have a lot of beds but are most of them usable? In most of the hospitals there could be 25 beds but only half of them are ever occupied. Yet we have another hospital 15km away like that. We could consolidate those two together and offer better services to people.
“If they go back to the service optimisation plan, which is informed by data and science, and they give the political support for this, they can start turning the Eastern Cape around,” he said.
DispatchLIVE
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.