Academic Hospitals under central control: ANC
“These are central assets which [offer a] service across provinces… these are hospitals attached to universities,” said Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi, who is a member of the health and education commission.
He said it made sense to move control of these hospitals from the provinces to the national health department, as university training was a national competency.
This would also resolve the problem of referring patients across provincial borders.
Motsoaledi said 1000 students would leave for Cuba later this year to study medicine.
It cost R1.7 million to train a doctor over seven years in South Africa. The same training would cost R700,000 in Cuba.
He dismissed concerns that Cuba’s medical training was “inferior” to South Africa’s.
Cubans had a longer life expectancy and had managed to eliminate many diseases on the island, including malaria and measles. The prevalence of tuberculosis was very low and that country had a 0.1 percent rate of HIV/Aids.
“Cuba has eradicated most of the diseases that are bedevilling us,” he said.
The ANC commission was also recommending that a dedicated National Health Insurance fund be established urgently; that the state be a major shareholder in a state-owned pharmacy; and, that the primary training of nurses should take place in hospitals, not universities.
It wanted a healthcare commission set up to promote initiatives to ensure people needed less healthcare. It should also look at issues such as reducing smoking, getting South Africans to eat better and exercise, and improving road safety.
Motsoaledi was briefing the media on the final day of the ANC’s four-day policy conference.
Recommendations from the policy conference will be finalised at the 53rd ANC national conference in Mangaung, Free State, in December.
These policies will form the basis for the ANC government’s policies, new laws or amended laws.
Source : Sapa
Author
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Academic Hospitals under central control: ANC
by Health-e News, Health-e News
July 2, 2012