Plea for unemployed doctors

DEAR Minister Aaron Motsoaledi, you called for unemployed doctors to reach out to you. You promised to give unemployed doctors work in our already resource-strained environment – a promise you did not keep.

We have dedicated our lives to the service of people.

As unemployed junior doctors, we have dug ourselves deep into study and daily debt, while others work themselves into exhaustion. Health care is a difficult business. Health care will always require more staff and more resources.

Existing doctors can barely keep up with the workload and most times stay hours after their shifts end to work for free.

We support the National Health Insurance (NHI) and we welcome the R4.5 billion dedicated towards revitalising health facilities in the NHI pilot districts.

However, besides the financial injection into facilities, a similar injection into the human resources element is required.

South Africa is on the verge of a crisis on two fronts.

We have an excellent health vision for our country based on the National Development Programme, and the importance of primary health care is not doubted.

However, this public health-care system is struggling.

Politicians and health managers are straining the health-care system.

Oversight by politicians who hold positions of influence does nothing or little to engage with protocol and issues on the ground.

In the spirit of frankness, all health professionals need to introspect and ask how we can reclaim our professional and strategic role in running a quality health-care system.

This crisis is borne out by the plethora of unemployed junior doctors in the Western Cape.

Minister, The Junior Doctors Association implores your intervention in the case of one doctor who cannot relocate because she has two beautiful daughters and is happily married to a husband who works in this province.

Minister, there is a newly graduated doctor who would have been the only breadwinner in her family as both her parents are unemployed.

She is deep in student debt and cannot abandon her family, so remains waiting for a job.

Minister, another newly graduated doctor is a single child whose mother was paralysed in a car accident and who subsequently suffered from a stroke.

The father is not equipped to care for his wife on his own.

Minister, there are 24 newly graduated doctors still unemployed in our province.

We implore you to consider making funds available to place at least the ones with family that cannot relocate.

Dr Motsoaledi, as a previously practising doctor, you will know that morale in the health sector is at an all-time low. But we are resilient.

However, we are not strong enough to overcome all of our challenges.

Health and allied health professionals have made an oath which we live by.

All we want is work for our unemployed colleagues so that we can use our hands to heal South Africans.

The Junior Doctors Association of SA calls for bold, constructive leadership with a shared vision and common purpose that allows all trained doctors and nurses back to work.

Doctor’s dreams are dying but we are hopeful, full of energy, buoyed by love for our profession and caring beyond measure.