Preventive health care the way to go

A SHIFT back to basics was the way to go as the country sought to provide universal access to quality health care.

This is according to a professor who spoke at a recent health conference in Pretoria.

“We need to think about the person and who they are, even before they become our patients,” the chairman of the board of office of Health Standards Compliance, Professor Lizo Mazwai, said.

Doctors had to take into account what people went through to actually get to hospital.

“How many rivers do they cross, how many buses or taxis do they take, how much money must they use? Think about that before telling a patient to come (back) to hospital,” he said.

Mazwai, a general practitioner and surgeon in Mthatha, in the Eastern Cape, said focusing on diseases and hospital care was one of the biggest let-downs in the history of health care in the country.

He said there was a need to emphasise community-based care, a system which meant people were known before they got sick and had profiles on their home life before they went to hospital.

“They must be visited at home, followed to the clinic and provided with therapy and the skills to take care of themselves,” he said.

Mazwai was a member of a panel of experts at a Discovery Foundation conference.

He told the gathering of health practitioners that people should not be allowed to get so sick in the first place that they had to go to hospital.