Finance won’t rescue bumbling health – MEC
Creecy says bailouts won’t solve problems
The embattled Gauteng department of health, which is struggling to pay service providers, will not be bailed out this time.
This is according to Gauteng finance MEC Barbara Creecy, who said the province isn’t planning to throw money at the department’s financial problems.
Creecy is chairing a special provincial cabinet committee on health which seeks to stabilise the finances of the department so that it could continue to deliver its healthcare responsibilities to citizens.
She told Sowetan that the committee was working on a “broader strategy” to find solutions to existing problems in financial management, revenue generation, managing medical supplier depots and the handling of litigation.
“The complexities don’t just relate to money and money wouldn’t necessarily solve the problems,” Creecy said.
She added: “What we are trying to do is to have a thorough understanding of exactly where the problems lie, if we have to make an allocation in the [budget] adjustment, we would want to know if that allocation will be spent on what it needs to be spent on.”
She said even though their intervention may not be able to “solve all the problems”, they wanted to see the department being able to serve the people who use public hospitals.
“The reasons we are doing this is that we don’t want a situation to arise whereby the department can’t provide services to people,” she said.
The department’s budget was already under pressure this year as it needed to settle hundreds of millions of accruals from the previous year.
Health MEC Gwen Ramokgopa recently told the provincial legislature’s health portfolio committee that an “insurance model” was being considered so that payments for medical negligence lawsuits did not come from the patient care budget.
Medical negligence cases have already led to the department losing two truckloads of furniture, including 400 computers and other equipment which were attached by the sheriff of court after failures to settle a R6.2-million negligence lawsuit.
The department’s budget for 2017/2018 stands at R40.2-billion, however, it already faces potential medical negligence claims of more than R10-billion from dozens of cases still before the courts.
The DA’s shadow MEC for health in Gauteng, Jack Bloom, said with medical negligence payouts coming directly from hospital budgets, this increased the risk for future negligence claims.