The PA will improve the performances of public hospitals and work to ensure better services.

 

Where possible, the PA will put local communities and experts, not unaccountable bureaucrats, in charge of improving the performance of public hospitals by creating community-controlled hospital boards that will manage hospital budgets by instilling a “patient-care first” (communities first) policy?

 

At government hospitals, patients have been known to stand in queues for as long as 24 hours. There is clearly a great need to improve public healthcare. The most important health department in the country, Gauteng provincial health, annually gives back money to Treasury that it has not been able to spend. That unspent money is clear robbery of the rights of our people to healthcare. 

 

The PA would explore going into more public-private partnerships in order to raise the level of public healthcare to something similar to that enjoyed by those in private healthcare.

 

The PA will introduce drug-related healthcare centres in all areas of the country that are struggling overwhelmingly with the scourge of drugs.

 

The PA will establish more mobile clinics to service rural areas and ensure that the mobile clinics already in service are dispatched more frequently and reliably as they are being heavily underutilised, which puts unnecessary strain on those such as farm workers who must undertake long journeys to access some of the most basic healthcare services.

 

At the moment, the state contributes to a state medical aid scheme that allows its workers to enjoy private medical treatment. This medical scheme regularly goes bankrupt, only to be funded once again from public coffers. State workers must be made to use their own facilities as this will encourage them to maintain these facilities at the highest levels. The state medical aid scheme merely uses tax money to support private business. It would be preferable that if something like this were to be in effect, a clear partnership be made first.

 

The current government is working to establish a national health insurance (NHI) system out of concerns for discrepancies within the national health care system, particularly unequal access to healthcare among different socioeconomic groups. The PA is not opposed to developing a more comprehensive state healthcare system, but the state must first prove it is able to use the resources already allocated to it before demanding more.