French HIV expert leaves SA
Treatment pioneer loses 7-year battle with HPCSA
ASEVEN-year struggle with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) has left legendary French HIV expert Dr Francoise Louis with no choice but to leave the country.
“It was May 21, 2001, I remember it well,” said Louis about being the first doctor to prescribe life-saving antiHIV drugs to a patient at the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) project in Khayelitsha.
She was one of the first doctors in the country to do so, working at a time when access to antiretroviral (ARV) medicine was extremely limited during the height of the Aids denialism era under former president Thabo Mbeki.
“It was such a victory for South African patients, and I was privileged to be a part of it. Just thinking about it makes me emotional,” she said.
Louis was recruited from France where she had been working as a specialist in HIV for over 10 years and this experience was desperately needed in the country at a time where almost no similar professionals yet existed.
But Louis told Health-e News that this memory was particularly difficult to process right now. She is set to board a plane back to France on June 30 after a protracted battle with the HPCSA finally came to an end.
She said there was now no hope for her to register to work in the country and the available jobs in humanitarian and HIV organisations required her to be registered to practise.
“I left everything in France 19 years ago and now I’m going back to a country I don’t know any more,” she said. “And the worst part about it is I won’t be working in HIV anymore.”
Louis was part of the team who developed the national HIV treatment protocol, she trained some of South Africa’s foremost health officials and HIV doctors and worked in HIV here and in other African countries. Louis has battled for the past seven years, supplying different forms of documentation requested by the HPCSA. The requests were always delayed with Louis claiming she often waited “months and months” for responses to her correspondence.
She said the requests by the HPCSA were often ridiculously intensive and complicated and were ever-changing.
The final straw came last month when the HPCSA requested Louis submit a “certificate of mentorship” from the French university where she qualified. “But my institution does not have such a document, it simply does not exist and the HPCSA won’t accept their version of my mentorship records,” said Louis.
This struggle has been experienced by many highly-skilled doctors who have confirmed this to Health-e News, and has been heavily criticised due to the severe shortage of skilled professionals in the public health sector.
The HPCSA failed to respond to repeated requests by Health-e News, despite being given at least a full week to do so, including numerous e-mails to HPCSA spokesperson Priscilla Sekhonyana.