Dr Lynette Pretorius raises concerns over the payment of the annual Health Professions Council of SA registration fee, which remain unanswered after several approaches to the HPCSA and the national Department of Health.
Pretorius writes:
I am a registered general practitioner with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA). By law, I am obliged to pay an annual fee to keep my registration with the Council, without which I may not practice my profession. However, I now have a few serious concerns regarding this matter:
We were notified of the annual fee payable for 2020/2021 on Wednesday 26 Feb 2020. The fee for a general practitioner is R2,500. When compared to the fee for 2019/2020, which was R2,055, this is an increase of R445, which equates to an increase of 21.65%. The fee for specialists increased from R2,095 to R2,540: an increase of 21.24%. How can the HPCSA justify an increase of >21% in annual fees, which is almost 5 times more than the current inflation rate of 4.5%?
I would also like to know if this increase of >21% is applicable to all disciplines/members registered with the HPCSA, or is it limited to medical practitioners?
I object to the HPCSA using its members' registration fees to pay for legal costs when making cases against them. The HPCSA gets more and more involved in law suits against its members. I find it a form of tyranny to oblige someone, by law, to be registered with a body in order to be able to do their work, but to then use this money to persecute/prosecute them. I suggest that the HPCSA gets funding from an outside source (tax money), when persecuting/prosecuting its own members.
Surely, you can't expect a person to pay his/her prosecutors (forced by law), as well as be responsible for his/her own defence (we all pay exorbitantly high fees for malpractice insurance)?
Dr Lynette Pretorius