Caregivers still face challenges
MANY Community health workers (CHWs) in Gauteng are still in the position they were four months ago: unpaid and desperately seeking resolution to their grievances.
The CHWs form a crucial health-care arm in South Africa, helping patients who are too ill to get out of bed to get their medication from clinics. They also perform home visits to patients, making sure they have basic care and are able to take their medication.
Four months ago, the Gauteng community health workers embarked on a go-slow over issues around the payments of their stipends, whether they have become an outsourced service supposedly overseen by Smart Purse (Solutions) and the exact nature of their relationship with the health department.
According to the CHWs’ task team leader Lucky Mokone, the issues they have been raising over the past few months remain the same.
“CHWs are still being pressurised by the department of health to sign with Smart Purse because they say the company is responsible for the monitoring and evaluation of workers, but this has not been happening,” Mokone explained.
“It’s almost Christmas time, and people want to have money to feed their families. Some have even decided to just sign with Smart Purse and see what happens next year, even though this entire thing is so uncertain,” Mokone said.
CHWs in the province have been voicing their outrage over the agreement that the department of health has with Smart Purse Solutions. The agreement sees the company being paid R87 million over a period of three years to administer the salaries of CHWs on behalf of the government, as well as to monitor and evaluate the services they provide.
“We don’t want to sign with Smart Purse as that means we are not employees of the department of health, and we do not want to be outsourced,” said Zoleka Mbotshelwa, of the Gauteng Community Health Workers’ forum, a group that serves a similar function to the task team.
Mbotshelwa said one of the other problems with the current set-up is that people who have been working for a few months in their capacity as CHWs still don’t have formal employment agreements with the department.
Other workers, who have signed contracts, say they have also not been paid, said Mbotshelwa, while Mokone said outsourcing their services was a system open to corruption.
“We recently found out from our people in the Joburg Metro who work in one of the clinics in Soweto that when they went to sign with Smart Purse they found their posts had been filled by people who don’t exist,” Mokone said.
He said when they brought this to the department’s attention, they were told there was an investigation under way of ghost workers who were claiming monies. He said there was a similar situation in clinics in Ekurhuleni.
The CHWs will be marching to the department in the city centre to raise their grievances again on Tuesday.
Repeated attempts to get comment from the Gauteng health department through its spokesman, Steve Mabona, were unsuccessful.