Gauteng Health is paying community health workers
The Gauteng Department of Health has released payment to more than 8 500 Community Health Workers (CHWs) starting from last week Thursday, 6 February 2014.
Currently, a total of 8 592 CHWs have been paid for the months of October and November 2013.
Yesterday, Tuesday, 11 February 2014, a total of 4 185 CHWs were paid for the months of December 2013 and January 2014.
By the end of this week, an additional 3 907 CHWs will receive their stipends for the months of December 2013 and January 2014. This will result in a total of 8 092 CHWs fully paid until the end of January 2014.
There are however about 550 CHWs who remain unpaid from October 2013 as they have not yet submitted correct documentation required for the payment process.
The process of resolving outstanding details of CHWs who have not yet submitted things like correct banking details, is continuing at District level with the affected CHWs and payment will be processed once the information is received and captured on our database.
The whole payment process follows a decision taken last year by the MEC (and discussed with non-governmental organisations [NGOs] and CHWs) stating that from October 2013 until March 2014, CHWs will be paid by the department directly.
The department annually contract various non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to assist with the implementation of various health programmes dealing with HIV, AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases (STIs) and TB.
Following numerous challenges related to the effective management of Community Health Workers, critical decisions were taken to improve the situation going forward, which included a verdict for the department to take over the task of paying community health workers from NGOs, register them individually as service providers and pay them directly using the Gauteng Provincial Government SAP payment system. It was also decided that the NGOs (working with Health Districts) should continue to do supervision and monitoring of the day to day work of CHWs.
It was further decided that an audit of skills CHWs be done and based on the audit report, the Department will develop a programme to upskill those who do not have adequate and/or relevant skills. This is purely aimed at building capacity to implement the national decision on Ward Based Outreach Teams (to be led and managed by professional nurses) which is part of Primary Health Care Re-engineering. Through this process, the CHWs will also be upskilled in order to qualify for various career opportunities within the department.
In addition, in was also decided to commission a thorough assessment and evaluation of the work of all contracted NGOs to check if the work they are doing is in line with departmental programmes and expected health outcomes.
Although there were delays in verifying information from some of the NGOs and CHWs and we also experienced numerous technical glitches when effecting some of the payments, the department remains committed to ensuring that all registered CHWs receive their stipends as per the decision to pay them directly. They continue to provide essential services in our communities and we appreciate their work.
Enquiries:
Simon Zwane
Cell: 082 551 9892
