The Democratic Alliance (DA) has submitted a Public Access to Information Act (PAIA) application to the KwaZulu-Natal Health Department (DoH) in a bid to obtain its newly drafted medical volunteer policy.
The move comes as numerous medical doctors and nurses – who are not currently within the province’s healthcare system – wait to assist colleagues struggling under the load of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In April 2020, KZN Health MEC, Nomagugu Simelane-Zulu, put out a call for medical volunteers, particularly doctors, to assist the department during the pandemic. Many doctors, including myself, submitted our names. However, to date, we have received no feedback from the DoH regarding placement.
The DA’s continuous follow-up’s regarding this matter with KZN Health head of department (HOD), Dr Sandile Tshabalala, finally resulted in his admission to the province’s Health portfolio committee, on 26 January, that the DoH currently has no human resources policy when it comes to medical volunteers and that it was actually dismantled many years ago.
The DA subsequently pushed MEC Simelane-Zulu and KZN Premier, SihleZikalala, to intervene in this deplorable situation. The MEC did finally respond – via parliamentary replies to the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) and through her State of the Province (SOPA) debate – to say that a policy now exists and that doctors should follow the procedures in place.
The DA then wrote to HOD Shabalala as a matter of urgency to request this policy and protocols. To date, our requests remain unanswered. We are now forced to resort to a PAIA application to get a copy of the department's new Medical Volunteer Policy.
The pleas for help from KZN’s healthcare workers as they buckled under the strain of the second wave of COVID-19 cannot be easily forgotten. Certainly, the crises experienced at hospitals such as Addington, Northdale, are a stark reminder of the severe staff shortages that have existed for years and which came back to haunt the DoH during the pandemic.
It is critical that the DoH address this failure and present its new volunteer policy. It is all the more important as both the national and provincial Departments of Health have shown a complete inability to rollout a proper vaccination process and as experts such as Professor Shabir Madhi indicate that a third wave of COVID-19 infections is now inevitable. This while other experts predict that this new wave will be as severe or greater than the devastating second wave.
Our KZN healthcare workers, particularly within the public sector, require support without any further delays. The DA will continue to fight for this support and to ensure that those medical volunteers who want to assist are not prevented from doing so.
Issued by Rishigen Viranna, DA KZN spokesperson on Health