MEC wants to provincialise Joburg service

Gauteng health MEC Bandile Masuku said his department was hoping to put Johannesburg emergency workers under provincial government by January next year.

This as suspended firefighters working for Emergency Management Services (EMS) in Johannesburg were in the throes of a legal battle with their employer.

Firefighters were claiming their alleged unprotected strike earlier this year was justified because they were being forced to break regulations and the law by attending to emergencies without supervisors and in poorly maintained vehicles.

The South African Medical Association (Sama) said it was looking into claims by trade union Demawusa that municipal emergency workers in Johannesburg were routinely being forced to put state patients at risk by giving them sub-par emergency care.

According to Sama’s Dr Akhtar Hussain, the organisation was unaware of any indication that patients left at the care of state doctors were receiving less than satisfactory care from the city’s first responders.

EMS and over 200 of its employees were at odds over the interpretation of the regulations of the Health Practitioners Council of South Africa (HPCSA), which the firefighters claimed they and other municipal emergency workers were constantly in breach of.

But Masuku said where provincial emergency workers were concerned, he observed little to complain about after he conducted ride-alongs with provincial emergency workers last weekend.

He concluded that he was “satisfied” with the resources and the quality of the services provided by emergency personnel. But he said he was aware of issues facing the City of Johannesburg and those raised by the unions.

“I think the situation [in Johannesburg] pertains to a different context altogether in terms of Gauteng EMS, and this is why we want the province to provincialise the EMS so that we are able to give them similar treatment and level of competency.

“We are clear that we are moving into provincialising. We have had a few hiccups in Johannesburg and I think now the agreement is that from January 1 next year the province should be running the EMS service in Johannesburg.”

But municipal workers union, the South African Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) suggested the issues facing emergency services personnel in the province could not be solved by provincial government alone.

According to Bafana Zungu, Samwu provincial secretary, the city’s management issues were at the heart of problems facing municipal emergency personnel.