FOCUS: MEDICAL PRACTICE
Medical posts added to revised Critical Skills List – finally
In a major concession by government to the growing medical staff crisis, the revised Critical Skills List – gazetted on 2 August – includes five pages of medical posts, with at least a dozen specialist categories. None of the drafts or previous lists did.
The inclusion of medical posts comes amid a growing shortage of healthcare professionals, with the past year seeing an exodus of 35,000 from the country, particularly specialists, and predictions of more emigrations before the National Health...
FOCUS: POLICY
Critical need for national strategy to address chronic surgical backlog
National Department of Health statistics reveal that more than 107,000 non-emergency or elective surgeries were put on the back burner during the COVID-19 pandemic. But challenges in addressing surgical backlogs were there long before COVID-19, writes Alicestine October for Spotlight.
Professor Kathryn Chu, director of the Centre for Global Surgery at Stellenbosch University’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, said compared with infectious diseases like HIV, TB, and COVID-19, surgical conditions and care were not a major priority in the...
FOCUS: MEDICAL PRACTICE
How therapeutic fashion trumps medical evidence
Profit motives and fear of missing out or going against the trend, has led to health professionals following therapeutic fashions instead of questioning accepted procedures and following medical evidence instead, notes Medical Brief.
Writing in Medscape, Dr John M Mandrola writes: "I’ve been thinking a lot about how the standard of care in medicine is established and then becomes resistant to critical appraisal, and these were not happy thoughts.
In fact, I’ve come to believe that too often, therapeutic fashion trumps medical...
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