SACP on public health system:During October, the SACP focused its annual Red October campaign on the public health service. This is an extract from its press statement.
SACP on the problemsWhile we are spending R25-billion on the Gautrain, and R9-billion on 2010 stadia, many of our hospitals, especially those serving the workers and the poor, do not even have the minimum health-care infrastructure budgets that were theoretically allocated to them for this budgetary year.
We have also received reports of massive staff shortages in many public hospitals, and many of our rural clinics are simply not functional.
We are told that in some instances, patients have to walk out of health care facilities to procure for themselves aspirins, as they are not available in hospitals.
Due to staff shortages, most of the patients who are admitted to casualty wards do not get treatment as they are not classified as emergencies, especially after hours.
This has compromised the quality of the treatment that the workers and the poor receive.The constant decline of South Africans' life expectancy and an alarming increase in the infant mortality ratio happens in the face of the growing inequalities between the rich and the poor and slow attempts and targets to improve the living conditions of the people.
Whilst most of these problems have been inherited from the apartheid regime, there is no doubt that our democratic government could have addressed them better were it not for the excessively contractionary and contradictory macro-economic policies followed since 1996.
Whilst we are told that GEAR has enabled us to manage our finances better and we now have a budget surplus, the problem is that the same GEAR has instructed us to cut health budgets and capacity and infrastructure building which are now even compromising our capacity to spend the moneys we have.
It is the cumulative impact of this macro-economic policy that is inhibiting us from building an equitable, accessible and affordable health system.
Instead of increased focus on building public health capacity we seem to be hesitatingly seeking to introduce an element of private health care in our own public hospitals, without a clear strategy to tackle the fundamentals of building a decent public health system.
Another dimension of the health crisis in our country is the yawning gap between the public and private health systems, the former catering for predominantly the black majority and the latter for whites and a layer of the black elite.
In many ways the colonialism of a special type health inequalities are daily being reproduced despite some advances made by government in making health care accessible and affordable for the majority of our people.
Our structures will throughout this month and beyond visit hospitals and community clinics in the various localities to inspect their conditions and interact with the communities, workers and community health care givers to further understand their challenges.
At the end of this campaign, we hope to be able to consolidate a register of needs for our public health care system and, in partnership with government and various stakeholders, work towards achieving meaningful solutions.
Extract from the SACP’s RED ALERT, Volume 6 No 18, October 3, 2007.
The SACP demands:
Well-resourced public hospitals with basic medication and other facilities. Functioning community health clinics with staff and medication.
Accelerated implementation of government's comprehensive HIV/AIDS programmes.
Improvement of the wages, conditions of service of all health workers, including community health workers
Source
Numsa News