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'Vulture lawyers preying on state'

"Parasitic" and "criminal" lawyers are hanging out in hospital waiting rooms, waiting for babies to be born of difficult births so they can file damages claims against the state, parliament has heard.

Six provincial health departments appeared before a joint meeting of parliament's standing committee on appropriations and portfolio committee on health to discuss the delivery of health services.

Some of them said high medicolegal claims were mostly the work of unscrupulous attorneys looking to cash in after the Road Accident Fund cracked down on similarly inflated claims.

Some of the provinces have contingent liabilities running into billions of rands.

KwaZulu-Natal, with the second highest number of claims after Gauteng, said its contingent liabilities stood at almost R10-billion.

KwaZulu-Natal MEC for health Dr Sibongiseni Dhlomo said the claims were not purely the result of negligence, and said radio adverts by law firms encouraged people to call them if they felt they had received poor treatment from the state. He said lawyers were also colluding with doctors to get patient files in order to lodge claims.

Dhlomo said the majority of claims were birth related - specifically cerebral palsy as a result of birth complications. And, while he said there were legitimate claims, unscrupulous attorneys were visiting early childhood development centres looking for children with cerebral palsy so they could lay claims against the state.

"If we admit that we made a mistake there must be compensation, but in some cases millions are being requested for future medical expenses when we should rather be saying that person can walk into any of our facilities and receive the medical treatment they need at any point because even if they are claiming millions for medical expenses, they are still ending up back in our hospitals," he said.

KwaZulu-Natal MEC for finance Belinda Francis Scott said the process was "not only criminal, but parasitic. They are vultures".

She said even in private practice, gynaecologists and obstetricians were taking out "massive insurance" policies for similar claims. "If there is a problem birth, there are lawyers waiting there, before the baby is even born. And they tell the family they are submitting a claim for R100000 and then they submit a claim for R2-million and pocket the rest."

Appropriations committee chair Pink Phosa resolved to call Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi to discuss the matter as it was draining valuable resources.

Gauteng health department HOD Dr Ernest Kenoshi said the amount of claims was "outrageous". The department said it had paid R600-million to lawyers in the past year alone.

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