Task team to probe healthcare meltdown
This follows a report released yesterday (11th) by the Eastern Cape Health Crisis Action Coalition of a widespread deterioration of patient care.
Health ministry spokesperson Joe Maila said the national task team would “find corrective measures and hold people accountable for failing to deliver acceptable healthcare to our people”.
“We acknowledge that there are problems and we are going to deal with them, but we really object to the fact that confidential patient records have been used in the public domain,” said Maila.
Treatment Action Campaign national chairperson Anele Yawa said the Minister had met with Coalition leaders on Monday and undertaken to investigate all complaints, including the suspension of a doctor, Dingeman Rijken, who had reported on the deth of his patient, known only as “Baby Ikho”.
Justice Zac Yacoob, a board member of Coalition member SECTION27, said his organisation regarded court action as the last resort.
“I have read the affidavits on which the report is based and they are horrendous,” said Yacoob at a Coalition press conference.
“The Minister of Health is unhappy about the publicity and understandably so, but people have tried to deal with this quietly for many, many years.
“Corruption is a huge part of the problem. It is so deep that unless the police can act hand-in-hand with the health department, the problems will not be resolved.
“Premature court proceedings are never good. We would like the department to produce a plan about how and by what time these problems are going to be resolved.
“We are very reluctant to go to court, but if we have to, we will.” – Health-e News Service.
Author
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.
Task team to probe healthcare meltdown
by kerrycullinan, Health-e News
September 12, 2013
Related
SA is not yet polio-free
South Africa is part of a ‘pariah group’ of countries not yet certified polio-free, thanks to weaknesses in our disease surveillance and vaccination programme. The Department of Health is determined to win back its certificate next month, and launched an immunisation coverage survey last week to investigate the nation’s vaccination rate.
Do you know what’s in your food?
The food industry often conceals the unhealthy products in its processed foods – even manipulating science to fool consumers. Now government is planning to introduce warning signs on food to help us to navigate what we are eating.
Bloated bodies and barren lands
What has obesity got to do with climate change? Quite a lot, according to an influential commission, which says the big food companies that make the junk food fuelling our expanding bodies are also destroying our environment– and need to be stopped.