Honourable Speaker
Honourable Members
It is both an honour and a pleasure for me to present to this house for a second reading a very important Bill, namely the National Health Amendment Bill.
The deteriorating quality of healthcare in our public hospitals has been a thorn in the flesh of our country for quite some time.
For this term of office of government, it was illustriously captured by the President during his very first State of the Nation Address in 2009.
“Fellow South Africans, “We are seriously concerned about the deterioration of the quality of health care, aggravated by the spiraling increase of the burden of disease in the past decade and a half”.
As a department we have set ourselves clear goals and objectives as set out in the Negotiated Service Delivery Agreement (NSDA).
These are:
- Increased life expectancy
- Decreased maternal and child mortality rates
- Combating HIV, AIDS and TB
- Strengthened health system effectiveness
While we have experienced tremendous success in the first three, we are experiencing very serious and disturbing challenges with respect to the fourth Outcome, that is the effectiveness of the health system.
We have identified five areas where we need to deal with this issue effectively. I will deal with only one of these five today, which is the issue of quality. There will be many debates as to what constitute quality what leads to deterioration.
We have decided in the first instance, to focus on six standards which we call Core Standards. They are very basic minimum standards. We believe no facility must be called a health facility if they do not comply with these standards.
Honourable Speaker, we thought that in order to be sure that these basic standards are adhered to, we need to establish a well-oiled and well structured institution whose sole purpose is to ensure and enforce these core standards.
Today, we are presenting to this House, a Bill to do exactly that. The Bill is intended to amend the existing National Health Act to establish a public entity called the Office of Health Standards Compliance or OHSC.
This body is styled along the same lines as the British Quality Care Commission. This entity will have three units. The first unit will be the Inspectorate.
In terms of this Bill, it will be mandatory for this unit to inspect each and every health facility once every four years. The problematic ones will be inspected as often as possible so that they are monitored frequently to avoid deterioration until there is a crisis as is now happening in some hospitals around Gauteng, Limpopo and Eastern Cape.
We would like to avoid the deterioration that we are now seeing as much as possible as is now happening in three of our provinces.
We have already sent twenty (20) individuals to Britain to train as inspectors of our facilities. During public hearings people have confused these inspectors with Environmental Health Care Inspectors, who in the past were called Health Inspectors.
There will still be Environmental Health Care Inspectors within the system, but in terms of this Bill, the Inspectors we are referring to will specifically inspect quality standards, including the six Core Standards that I have mentioned earlier.
Once inspected, the facility will be graded from grade A to grade F and the report will be released publicly. The second unit will be a Health Ombudsperson.
This unit will function as an area where members of the public will lodge complaints about the negative experiences they may have encountered during their visits to health facilities.
These complaints will of course range from poor staff attitudes, long waiting times, non-availability of drugs, safety and security concerns etc.
Again there has been confusion during public hearings about the role of this unit, vis-à-vis professional bodies like the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA), the South African Nursing Council (SANC) and the South African Pharmacy Council (SAPC).
These professional bodies usually deal with individual professional misconduct like negligence, unethical behaviour or unprofessional behaviour.
It is usually well-to-do people who know about these professional bodies and how to approach them. Ordinary members of the public are usually at a loss on how to address their concerns.
Honourable Speaker, as a department we did not fold our arms and wait for this entity to be launched in terms of this Bill in order to act. As early as April this year we have trained at least forty (40) individuals and divided them into facility improvement teams.
They have been moving from district to district to help institutions to improve basic standards. They have made progress Honourable Speaker, but unfortunately the work is overshadowed by extremely disturbing events generally in 3 provinces namely Gauteng, Limpopo and Eastern Cape.
We will try to increase the number of teams and expedite their involvement in these provinces.
We have even identified 400 unemployed graduates in three major fields, i.e. finance, human resources and ICT.
They have undergone training in governance by Public Administration Leadership and Management Academy (PALAMA).
We have divided them into teams of 45 each and dispatched them to various provinces to help in the field of supply chain management, asset reconciliation and management and human resources management especially the cleaning of PERSAL (public administration system) in the provinces.
They have started working in April this year and we hope to see changes brought about by their work, in a short space of time.
Honourable Speaker we hope then that with the establishment of the OHSC our institutions will be on their tender hooks.
Each and every health facility manager will have to take full accountability for their actions and for omissions that may lead to some of the adverse events our facilities experience quite often.
I appeal to all of you to support this Bill.
In conclusion Honourable Speaker, I want to again thank the Portfolio Committee on Health under the stewardship of the Honourable Chairperson Dr Bevan Goqwana, for the sterling work they have done in ensuring that we get to this stage where we are about to pass the Bill. Your support going forward will always be invaluable.
Thank you
