Health stats in a nutshell
It’s not a good idea to get sick in the North West. It has the least doctors and professional nurses per capita in the country, with 21 doctors and 90 nurses for every 100 000 people.
In addition, North West spends the least on health ‘ R771 per person — which is almost half the Western Cape, the biggest spender which spends R1383 per person.
Medical specialists are almost extinct in Mpumalanga (a total of 15 specialists, or one for every 200 000 people), while there are serious shortages in Limpopo and North West.
KwaZulu-Natal has the least dentists per capita in the country, followed by the Eastern Cape and Limpopo.
There are only seven psychologists, 15 physiotherapists and 35 pharmacists in the whole of the Northern Cape. Nurses in the province also have one of the heaviest workloads, seeing an average of 47 patients a day.
Over the past few years, nurses’ workloads have steadily increased from 23.5 patients a day to 29.4, undoubtedly because there are now 109 professional nurses per 100 000 people whereas five years ago, there were 120.
But there has been an improvement in vacancies. Whereas in 2003, 31% of posts were vacant, this year the number has dropped to 27%.
Almost 40 million of the country’s 46,8 million people depend on the public health sector. Last year, there were 100 000 hospital beds available, a decrease of 7000 since 1998.
While malaria cases have dropped by two-thirds over the past four years, measles cases have tripled over the same period, indicating that not enough children are being immunised against the disease.
While accurate TB figures are hard to find, the WHO ranks SA as having the 10th highest TB rate in the world and a low treatment success rate of 68% in 2003 for the curable infectious disease.
TB cases have jumped from 349 per 100 000 people in 2000 to 550 in 2003, with the worst affected provinces being the Northern Cape, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. Cases in KZN have more than doubled in three years
Almost 30% of pregnant women are testing HIV positive in antenatal clinics, with a massive 38.5% of women aged 25 to 29 testing positive. KZN has the highest rate by far (40.7%), followed by Gauteng and Mpumalanga.
It is estimated that 16% of South Africa’s total population is infected with HIV.
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