Death certificate should cite 'State incompetence'

28 July 2014 - 02:00 By The Times Editorial
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People are dying every day in South Africa because government hospitals do not have stocks of the medication needed to keep them alive.

One such was Dorcas Thokoane, who succumbed to colon cancer at the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital at the weekend after being told repeatedly, over a period of four months, that the hospital had run out of Irinotecan.

The drug had given Thokoane a new lease on life in the previous year - she had gained weight and become a "joyful person", according to her sister. To have such hope dashed on the rock of bureaucratic inertia must be heartbreaking for the family.

An unsung NGO called the Stop Stock Outs Project tries to monitor supplies of life-giving drugs at government hospitals and clinics and, when it detects a shortage, gives the public service monolith a prod and a push to rectify the situation and save a life.

As laudable as this initiative is, why should it be necessary?

A government that makes a song and dance about having the welfare of poor people at heart simply does not translate enough of its bluster into providing the majority of the populace with adequate medical care.

It comes down to plain bad management. Day-to-day management might not be the glamorous part of governing a country but it is the very foundation of good government.

The ANC is hell-bent on introducing a national health insurance scheme - to bring better-quality free or affordable medicine to more people. This is arguably a very good thing in a developing country such as ours, even if one is on the free market side of the economic argument.

Trouble is, the ANC government's record in health services gives us no confidence that it can run such a complex scheme. By contrast, private sector health facilities, while being suspiciously pricey, are models of excellence.

Surely a partnership between government and the private sector - based not on coercion but on cooperation born of a common patriotism - would be the win-win solution.

We simply can't trust the government to do it alone. Just ask the family of Dorcas Thokoane.

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