Limpopo cancer patients wait a year for radiation
Limpopo’s cancer patients are waiting on average for a year before getting vital radiation therapy, a sign of the immense pressure facing the provincial health department, Parliament heard on Wednesday.
In a frank presentation to Parliament’s health portfolio committee, Limpopo health MEC Poppy Ramathuba described how chronic budget pressures, staff shortages and dilapidated equipment were compromising patient care.
The Limpopo health department received a qualified audit from the auditor-general in 2016-17, despite reductions in its wasteful and irregular expenditure. It began the 2018-19 fiscal year with accruals of R1.09bn and R739m in outstanding employee benefits, against a budget allocation of R19.5bn.
About 40% of the accruals were due to overspending on the R863m budget allocation for medicines in 2017-18, due in part to a sudden surge in the price of some essential medicines, said Ramathuba. For example, the price of the malaria drug, artesunate, more than doubled from R160 a vial in April 2017 to R360 a vial in October 2017, she said.
Like most other provincial health departments, Limpopo faces massive medico-legal claims for harm allegedly suffered by patients at its hands, largely for cerebral palsy and orthopaedic cases. It paid out R28m for eight successful claims against it in 2017-18, and faces a further 796 claims totalling R4.35bn.
The health portfolio committee has asked all nine health MECs to appear before it and describe the state of hospital services in their provinces.
Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Northern Cape preceded Limpopo, and all described growing service pressures.
Ramathuba said Limpopo had entered into a public-private partnership to provide dialysis services and was about to do the same for radiation therapy.
The cancer patient backlog was partly due to the fact that the department had only one functioning linear accelerator, and it was so outdated it could only treat 25 patients a day, Ramathuba said.
Earlier in the day a delegation from the Northern Cape described how its struggle to fill specialist posts was threatening its capacity to provide care.
“Take a lack of skills, late presentation at antenatal clinics, add long distances, and you have a lot of snowballing issues,” said Kimberley Hospital medical director Dion Thys on the sidelines of the meeting.
Thys told MPs that the provincial health department employed just 30 specialists, 27 of whom were at Kimberley Hospital. However, it was struggling to recruit a specialist to head its obstetrics and gynaecology unit, he said.
“The services are there, there are experienced medical officers in the unit, babies are born, operations are done, but we lack a lead person in the department,” he said.
The Northern Cape health department received a qualified audit in 2016-17 and has significant financial management challenges. MPs heard that it started the 2018-19 fiscal year with R532.6m in accruals, reflecting unpaid bills from previous years.
Its allocated budget for the 2018-19 fiscal year is R4.74bn.
THE SERVICES ARE THERE… OPERATIONS ARE DONE … BUT WE LACK A LEAD PERSON IN THE DEPARTMENT