Nurses do their morning rounds at the Tshepong Hospital in Klerksdorp. Experts have expressed their concerns over the exit of specialist staff from government hospitals. Pictures: Gallo Images If the department of health does not create a conducive working environment, specialist doctors and other practitioners will keep on moving to the private sector, say experts.
And the exodus could affect the National Health Insurance (NHI), medical experts have warned. The experts were commenting on recent reports that specialist doctors were continuing to resign from the government hospitals to join the private sector. Statistics from the national department of health revealed that between 2013 and this year, it lost about 12 745 doctors.
Health expert Dr Atiya Mosam said the escalating resignation of specialist doctors from the public health sector was a warning of a system under strain, driven by frozen posts, austerity measures and increasingly heavier workloads for junior staff and specialists that remain in the system. Mosam said this threatens the quality of care, worsens inequities between the public and private sectors and undermines clinical supervision and specialist training. “The NHI depends on a functional public health system with adequate specialist capacity to support referral pathways, clinical governance and continuity of care, and this crisis underscores the urgent need to strengthen primary health care (PHC) as weaknesses in PHC means that many patients are reaching specialists for conditions that should have been prevented, detected earlier, or managed at PHC level, unnecessarily overburdening specialist services,” said Mosam.
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“This will reduce avoidable hospital demand, allowing specialists to focus on complex care. Therefore, we need decisive action to retain specialists while simultaneously investing in PHC.” Mosam said the NHI was still in the making, hence the impact on doctors and what they decide to do was difficult to predict.
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