Appalling and unbelievable, no other country in the world could have medical negligence claims reaching a whopping R30bn in just over 20 years. This is scandalous.
Under the previous government, during our training, most of the information we gathered about medical negligence claims was from medical textbooks. It was a rare occurrence practically in those years.
For the many years since 1994, the budget that was allocated for national health services, was always far less than what was allocated for the department of education. It didn’t help that healthcare practitioners always complained about the extremely deficient budget, nothing was ever changed.
For instance, at Tembisa Hospital we used to receive about R7m for 11 theatres in May, by August it would always be depleted because some of that meagre allocation would be used to settle accruals from the previous year.
Enoch Godongwana is the first minister of finance to bring a long sought-after difference when he allocated for the 2024/25 financial year R848bn as opposed to the R60bn for the previous financial year.
It has been pointed out multiple times that underfunding has been the source of everything that plagued our healthcare services, resulting in high medical negligence claims.
Instead of blaming lawyers and doctors for the billions of medical negligence claims, the department of health and all the managers of hospitals need to do better than they have done all these years since becoming the government of this country.
Cometh Dube-Makholwa, Midrand
READER LETTER | Medical negligence claims out of control
Image: 123RF/Lucian Coman
Appalling and unbelievable, no other country in the world could have medical negligence claims reaching a whopping R30bn in just over 20 years. This is scandalous.
Under the previous government, during our training, most of the information we gathered about medical negligence claims was from medical textbooks. It was a rare occurrence practically in those years.
For the many years since 1994, the budget that was allocated for national health services, was always far less than what was allocated for the department of education. It didn’t help that healthcare practitioners always complained about the extremely deficient budget, nothing was ever changed.
For instance, at Tembisa Hospital we used to receive about R7m for 11 theatres in May, by August it would always be depleted because some of that meagre allocation would be used to settle accruals from the previous year.
Enoch Godongwana is the first minister of finance to bring a long sought-after difference when he allocated for the 2024/25 financial year R848bn as opposed to the R60bn for the previous financial year.
It has been pointed out multiple times that underfunding has been the source of everything that plagued our healthcare services, resulting in high medical negligence claims.
Instead of blaming lawyers and doctors for the billions of medical negligence claims, the department of health and all the managers of hospitals need to do better than they have done all these years since becoming the government of this country.
Cometh Dube-Makholwa, Midrand
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