More than 700 000 patients visited clinics and community health centres between October and December last year. About 313 000 of these were children under the age of five while 387 500 were five years and older.
The department aims for a further increase in the number of people using clinics before the end of this financial year.
Gauteng Department of Health and Social Development MEC Ntombi Mekgwe says, “We are happy that people are now responding to our call of seeking medical assistance at clinics and only go to hospital on referral. We however urged more people to use the appropriate levels of care to avoid inconveniences such as long queues”.
The workload for professional nurses has markedly improved with each nurse seeing 33 patients a day. The improvement in the workload for nurses was achieved through the encouragement of patients to use clinics and community health centre as a first point of entry into the health care system.
Meanwhile, twenty five Community Health Centres, 18 hospitals’ Outpatient departments, 21 hospitals’ Accident and Emergency Units, and 21 pharmacies achieved the benchmark target for waiting times. This was achieved through empowering of the newly appointed and previously trained queue marshals on queue management.
Improvement and strengthening of the down referrals system of non-appropriate patients to Primary Health Care (PHC) Level also helped to reduce the number of patients presenting at hospitals and clients coming for repeat medication for chronic patients.
Enquiries:
Simon Zwane
Cell: 082 551 9892
More patients are responding to the call to use primary health care centres
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