“Reconciling Academic Excellence, Redress and Public Heath Capacity Building”
Master of Ceremony
Honourable Guests
Members of the Press
Ladies and Gentleman
I thank you for the honour of inviting me to celebrate the official opening of the new Public Health Building at the University of the Witwatersrand with you and to say a few words.
This university has been at the forefront of health professionals’ education since 1911, making it one of the oldest medical faculties in the country. Wits was founded as an open university with a policy of non-discrimination which came under serious challenge in 1959 when the Apartheid government promulgated the University Education Act that forced universities to become racially segregated.
To its credit, the Wits community protested strongly and continued to maintain a firm, consistent and vigorous stand against apartheid, not only in education, but in all its manifestations. These protests were sustained as more and more civil liberties were withdrawn and peaceful opposition to apartheid was suppressed.
The consequences for the University were severe - banning, deportation and detention of staff and students, as well as invasions of the campus by riot police to disrupt peaceful protest meetings.
Despite these obstacles the University pressed on and now takes its rightful place as one of most our most prestigious institutions in a democratic South Africa.
As the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), we aim to promote and ensure access to higher, vocational education and training, and skills development opportunities, which will in turn contribute towards improving the quality of life of all citizens of our country. The DHET and South African Government face enormous challenges in achieving our objectives.
These include creating greater access to post school learning and training opportunities for young people in our country, reducing barriers related to class, race, gender and disability and other inequities. By funding infrastructure development at our universities the DHET attempts to empower our universities towards increasing their enrolment capacity in specific fields, thereby improving access to quality higher education opportunities.
Through our University Infrastructure and Efficiency Funding programme, the department has injected, and will continue to inject, significant funding into improved university infrastructure across the system. Through this programme the DHET has also stimulated additional contributions to university infrastructure development from industry, the private sector in general and from institutions themselves. In the two-year period from 2007/08 to 2011/12 Government invested a total of R6.8 billion into infrastructure development across our public universities and has committed further R6 billion over the next three years towards upgrading and the expanding infrastructures of our universities. This amount excludes other funding for the system including the block grants, student financial aid, and funding allocated towards the establishment of the two new universities in Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape.
From 2007 up until 2015, the department will have allocated a total of R643.4 million towards infrastructure development at Wits alone. In the case of this specific facility, the new Public Health Building on the Parktown Campus which we are opening today, the DHET’s contribution of R70.3 million positively mobilised Wits’ own resources and R 39 million from the private sector towards ensuring its realisation.
This new facility includes a shared 400-seat lecture theatre, tutorial and seminar rooms for expanded undergraduate lectures, a computer laboratory, resource centre and facilities for additional undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as over 100 academic offices, including meeting and common rooms.
It is expected that the building will adequately accommodate the entire School of Public Health as well provide the teaching and laboratory space needs of some departments from within the current Medical School or hospital. Consolidation of the School of Public Health will free up additional clinical teaching and academic space in existing buildings at Wits.
I am very excited to see the quality of this facility and impressed with the success of the Infrastructure and Efficiency fund and what it has achieved at this university and across the sector as a whole.
In terms of the contribution that Wits makes to our higher education system generally, my officials tell me that it is growing quite substantially in Science Engineering and Technology programmes, including studies in human health sciences. The expected average annual growth in enrolments between the 2012 and 2013 academic year is 3.6% which is 0.6% higher than the national average.
We are also expecting that Wits will produce around 690 graduates in Human Health undergraduate programmes in 2013, which is an increase of 8.7%on the 2012 academic year. We are pleased with the commitment of Wits to support and contribute us in growing these high level skills programmes.
I would however like us to reflect on the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery programme, the MBChb as it is commonly referred to, which is a programme that is critical to the health sector and also the programme that many aspiring excellent students wish to enter into each year.
Unfortunately enrolments into the MBChb have remained relatively stable between 2000 and 2011 at an annual average of 1 319 students. However, in 2010 Wits had 237 first time entering students in this programme, compared to 178 in 2011, a relatively high decrease. This was also the case for MBChb graduates which decreased from 223 in 2010 to 210 in 2011. However my department, together with the Department of Health and the Medical Deans are working together to try and deal with this issue.
This platform is a good opportunity to reflect on the reasons for shortages of health science professionals in our country. Before doing that however I need to stress these shortages of health science professionals, including medical doctors, specialists, nurses, auxiliary health professionals, dentists, and pharmacists and so on, is not an issue only related to South Africa, but rather a challenge found in many countries across the globe.
These reasons include unfavourable work circumstances, skills imbalances and poor distribution of health workers in rural areas and city slums in particular. In addition the closure of some South African public nursing colleges in the 1990s caused a serious shortage in numbers and the quality of nursing staff and community health workers.
Financial differences in remuneration between public and private health services caused the number of physicians in the private sector to rise from 40% in 1980 to 79% in 2007. Both public and private health sectors in South Africa struggle, as most other countries do, in retaining well trained medical staff, with staff turn-over in some of our public institutions being as high as 80% per annum. What then, you may ask, is the DHET doing to help deal with these challenges?
The department has engaged intensively with the National Department of Health and established a Joint Health Science Education Committee which will amongst other things serve as a driving force towards strengthening and expanding and higher education and training system to enable it to develop and produce health sciences professionals for the country.
Extensive discussions have taken place between health science deans from all universities active in this field, as well as with the Health Professions Council of South Africa, the South African Nursing Council and the Nursing Educators Association. Discussion with health science deans and professional bodies focussed in particular on eradicating systemic blockages that are slowing down the efficient training and deployment and retaining of health professionals across the country.
In analyses of the success and graduation rates of students at all our universities, it became clear to the former Department of Education that we needed an intervention to improve student success in the system at the same time as we worked towards growth and increasing access to our universities. One such DHET programme is the Foundation Provisioning Grant which funds Foundation Programmes at universities.
This has been in place since the 2004/05 financial year. The primary purpose of Foundation Provisioning is to enhance the success rates of students who meet the minimum admission requirements of an institution and to ensure higher throughput and ultimately higher graduation rates at universities. It addresses input/output blockages that have a detrimental effect on enrolment planning and access to higher education study opportunities.
Wits is yet to submit its Foundation Provision Application for the enrolment of foundation students in 2013. I therefore invite the University to submit its application as a matter of urgency and to seriously consider Foundation Provision for its Health Science programmes, especially as an intervention to support students who do meet the admission requirements of the University in these programmes, but require additional support towards academic success.
In terms of Government’s intervention toward increasing the production of health science professionals, we introduced the Clinical Training Grant to support universities in this task. The training of our health workforce has to increase so that we produce over 15 000 graduates per annum by 2014. There is an immediate shortage of about 80 000 health care workers in South Africa. The production of nurses is a case in point:
The Human Resources for Health South Africa (HEARD) 2030 Draft HR Strategy for the Health Sector: 2012/13 – 2016/17 predicts an need for an increase of professional nurses from 98 per 100 000 in 2011 to 130 per 100 000 general population by 2025.The department has been supporting WITS since 2008 through the Clinical Grant, and to date the department has contributed a total amount of R288.2 million in clinical training funds.
The funds are intended to assist the university to cover the costs of training health professionals who need to acquire clinical skills for their profession before they graduate. Programmes which have benefitted from this grant include medicine, dentistry, nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech and hearing therapy and pharmacology.
These funds have been used to appoint additional clinical training staff; to appoint support staff for the delivery of clinical training services; to support partnership agreements with public and/or private providers of clinical training services; to help meet the operating costs of clinical training service delivery, and to improve the infrastructure needed for clinical training, including equipment and building refurbishment.
Through numerous interactions with Wits and other institutions as well as my department’s monitoring visits to institutions, it is evident that the Clinical Training Grant has had a significant impact on improving the clinical training facilities and the support for such training with regard to the staff complement. Students are also now better prepared for the specific clinical skills which are needed particularly in primary health care. The impact of the Clinical Training Grant in building the capacity for health in the country cannot be underestimated.
My department remains committed to supporting the University through the numerous funding mechanisms and interventions as we go forward to ensure that the production of Health Science professionals strengthens and improves.
I wish the University and in particular the Faculty of Health Sciences and the School of Public Health success in its continuous endeavours to provide our nation with highly skilled health professionals.
I thank you.
