Eastern Cape Premier Oscar Mabuyane has ordered his Health Department to start recruiting jobless doctors within six weeks, after around 170 unemployed doctors delivered an ultimatum to his Bhisho office on Monday.
They threatened to shut down the province’s healthcare system if their demands for jobs were not met, reports Daily Dispatch.
Mabuyane told officials to launch the process to employ them, using money to be redirected from other programmes in the Health budget.
It is understood the department has more than 1 500 vacancies for doctors and other clinical staff.
Mabuyane confirmed he had ordered the department to redirect some of its dwindling budget towards the employment of the doctors before the financial year ends in March.
Other unemployed doctors would be contracted after 1 April when the department received its new budget for the 2025/2026 financial year, he said.
His orders came after an alleged standoff between the department and the provincial Treasury over Health’s overtime bill.
It is understood the two departments had first met last week but could not find common ground on commuted overtime, a system the provincial Treasury believes should be scrapped.
Commuted overtime refers to the hours worked in addition to the total number of normal hours of work required in a facility to service operational needs.
The Dispatch understands some doctors earn an additional R50 000 to R89 000 a month in commuted overtime.
While the Treasury wanted to scrap or at least reduce the department’s commuted overtime bill to accommodate the jobless doctors, the department is said to have been adamant that the Treasury must find money to employ them.
Mabuyane was roped in after the two departments reached a deadlock. He said the issue of commuted overtime, which was budgeted at about R1bn, was one of the issues under discussion: in the meeting, the decision was made to scrap commuted overtime payments from 1 April.
This means the planned allocation of R960.5m in the 2025/2026 financial year, or R3bn in the medium-term expenditure framework, can be redirected to employ the additional doctors and other clinical staff.
He emphasised that there was not enough money to hire all of the doctors and none would be automatically absorbed into the system: they would all have to go through the normal recruitment process and apply for the available jobs.
“Yes, we are in need of doctors in a number of our institutions, but the priority is the (community service) and interns. That one is statutory and we are forced to find them spaces, but they also need supervisors.
“We have been arguing about why Health has a huge budget for commuted overtime while we are in desperate need of more doctors.
“These unemployed doctors must bear with us – we cannot collapse public administration by hiring people when we do not have money to pay them.”
DispatchLIVE article – Lifeline for protesting doctors (Restricted access)
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