Chairing Cabinet’€™s Governance and Administration cluster, Fraser-Moleketi told a media briefing in parliament this week that an audit of key delivery programmes in several departments, including health, had been completed.

Mbeki alluded to the assessments in his State of the Nation address last week,  stating that government would make the necessary interventions to address the issues raised in the audits.

He said that in order to improve service delivery in hospitals, by September this year Government would ensure that hospital managers were delegated authority and held accountable for the functioning of hospitals. Policy issues regarding training, job grading and accountability would be managed by provincial health departments which themselves would need restructuring properly to play their role.

Fraser Moleketi said the audit found that ‘€œpublic hospitals are high stressed institutions due to staff shortages, unmanageable workloads and management failures. The situation with nurses is particularly acute’€.

The minister said blurred lines of authority and responsibility between province, district and hospital needed to be addressed.

She said her department would be ‘€œdrilling down’€ into the matter of the high vacancy rate. ‘€œWe need to, for example, understand why Mpumalanga has spent 108 percent of its wage bill, but has a 20 percent vacancy rate. We need to understand whether it’€™s a case of underfunding or whether it’€™s a management problem.’€

Fraser-Moleketi revealed that a focus on hospital managers in the next six months would include a review of the grading of posts and the development of a tailored training programme for CEOs.

The number of less skilled staff would be increased to ensure that health professionals did not do menial work, but were able to focus on their healthcare duties, Fraser-Moleketi added.

She said an investigation into the re-establishment of nurses training colleges would be completed by July. ‘€“ Health-e News Service.