The Department of Health has responded to a series of print and radio articles produced by Health-e News Service on the human resources crisis facing South Africa's health sector as well as the impact of the Department's delay in releasing a crucial Human Resources Plan.
Government's plan to address the critical shortage of nurses and doctors is months from developing practical guidelines.
The rapid antiretroviral rollout holds many pitfalls that are not properly acknowledged. MICKEY CHOPRA outlines some of the lessons and problems in the latest Critical Health.
Almost half of the recent 16 000 staff expansion of the United Kingdom's National Health System came from the recruitment of health professionals trained outside the UK and Europe, according to an article in The Lancet.
A South African resolution expressing concern over the continued international migration and recruitment of health personnel will be tabled at the World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva.
Health services in South Africa are being compromised as the country continues to experience a shortage of critical health personnel. Two months after the Minister of Health promised to release the all-important national human resources plan to address the under-staffed public sector, there is no sign of it yet.
An inadequate budget, a chronic shortage of staff and a deep gap in management undermine the quality of health care at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital. Unions, government, and hospital management all agree that remedial action is necessary.
In a desperate measure to curb the flight of professionals from the public health sector the Department of Health recently introduced two allowances ' the rural and the scarce skills allowance. But opinion demonstrates that the latter has proven problematic.
Where many nurses have left the public health sector for greener pastures elsewhere, there are still those who remain dedicated to their work. One such veteran has been at her post at Chris Hani Baragwanath for 34 years.
Patients are known to gauge the efficiency of their local health centre by how long they have to wait for their medication to be dispensed. This places immense pressure on pharmacists and their assistants who often work against all odds to deliver the medicine to the hundreds waiting.
'The shortage of staff makes everything bad. This is the cause of all the problems of working conditions of nurses,' says Sibonelo Cele, a staff nurse at Mahatma Gandhi Hospital, north of Durban.
Thousands of posts in the public health sector are vacant and the crisis is deepening as nurses, doctors and pharmacists leave in search of better working environments. However, a human resources plan to address the crisis has still not been released despite promises.
HIV/AIDS poses the greatest challenge to human resource development in the health sector, according to studies carried out by various research institutions.
For the last 10 years, professional nurse AILEEN TURNER has commuted between Cape Town and London in an attempt to make a decent living doing what she does best.
The huge workloads being shouldered by nurses are endangering the lives of patients, yet government does not seem serious about negotiating with nurses, says Thembeka Gwagwa, the general secretary of the Democratic Nurses' Organisation of SA (Denosa).
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