Panel seeks ways to end lawsuits

The Free State department of health says it has put together a panel of experts to investigate ways to improve efficiency at public hospitals where poor workmanship by doctors and nurses has cost it hundreds of millions of rands over the last decade.

MEC Benny Malakoane told the media that the team that currently is made up of hospital chief executive officers shall also include doctors and will review operations at state health institutions to see how the quality of service can be enhanced and incidents of negligence and other malpractices eliminated.

“We have put together the team of CEOs of the hospitals and later we will include doctors,” Malakoane said.

Malakoane disclosed in January that the department had lost more than R600 million between since 2004 in litigation cases arising from negligence and poor workmanship by health personnel at state hospitals.

He said the department had been slapped with 116 lawsuits over the past decade after some patients felt hard done-by at the service they received at government hospitals around the province.
The lawsuits came from a cross section of patients who included both men and women aged from about 18 years old and above.

The public health sector remains the source of health for the majority of more than 80 percent of people in the province and across the country. But most government hospitals are understaffed with most of them operating without critical staff like doctors, theatre personnel as well as nurses.

However Malakoane, who is a trained medical doctor, has previously said the high number of lawsuits did not mean there was a skills crisis in the provincial public health sector.

He said it was rather a case of some health professionals not having relevant expertise having to perform procedures that require certain skills different from their area of speciality.

The MEC also blamed some of the bad service on a less than professional attitude by some doctors which he said led to needless deaths of patients such as mothers and their babies during birth.
Marcus Molokomme, the chief executive of the Free State’s biggest referral centre, Pelonomi Regional Hospital, said the litigations were not a measurement of the quality of care at public hospitals but was most likely a reflection of the ever growing load that they have to handle.

Molokomme, who is also acting chief executive of the province’s biggest teaching hospital, Universitas Academic Hospital, said: “The litigations are not an indication of service that is being provided in the hospital.

“It may be a reflection of the load a hospital has to deal with …. (the) number of (litigation) cases is not a reflection of quality of service.”
To develop a wider skills base for public hospitals, the Free State provincial government has over the years sponsored hundreds of students to go and study medicine at local universities and in foreign lands such as Cuba and China.