Government needs to take urgent action to address the shortage of doctors, especially those with experience, at rural hospitals.

This was the plea made yesterday (13 Feb) to health Director General Ayanda Ntsaluba in a memorandum drawn up by the Rural Doctors Association of SA (Rudasa).

While community service has eased the shortage of doctors in some areas, says Rudasa, there is a lack of senior doctors to supervise these community service doctors.

Rudasa recommends the government develops incentives to be offered to senior doctors to attract them to rural hospitals. These could include rural allowances and better promotion opportunities.

In addition, only a quarter of community service doctors have opted to go to rural hospitals this year, says Rudasa. This has left a number of rural hospitals in the Eastern Cape with no community service doctors at all.

“The allocation process for community service needs to be redrawn to ensure that the most needy rural hospitals receive doctors before posts in urban tertiary hospitals are filled,” recommends Rudasa.

Rudasa chairperson Dr Ian Couper said his organisation was also concerned that foreign countries were recruiting South Africa doctors.  

“If a developed country recruits a doctor from the developing world, it should have to pay a fee to the doctor’s country of origin,” said Couper, echoing a similar call made earlier this week by Medical Research Council chairperson Professor Malegapuru Mokgoba.

Couper added that government also needed to examine how to attract South African doctors back to the country from places such as Canada and Britain.  

“The health department could look into offering three-year contracts, covering removal costs and offering a recruitment allowance,” said Couper, “as each South African we get back is worth a couple of foreign doctors.”

However, Couper says many senior foreign doctors who want to work in rural hospitals have given up as the government has made it virtually impossible for them to do so.

The Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA) had made it very difficult for doctors to register, while Department of Home Affairs made it very difficult for doctors to get and renew work permits, he said.

“Those foreign doctors already providing valuable, often irreplaceable service in rural hospitals are being made to feel increasingly insecure and unwelcome, and are migrating in significant numbers to other countries where they are welcomed, thus further depleting South African rural hospitals of experienced personnel,” says Rudasa’s memorandum.

However, Professor Len Becker, chairperson of the Medical and Dental Professional Board (part of HPCSA), said that moratorium on the registration of foreign-qualified medical practitioners and dentist had been revoked on 28 November last year.

The board is still “in the process of establishing guidelines, which will be published shortly, to enable foreign-qualified doctors to register with the council”, said Becker.