Spike in litigation threatens health care
PRETORIA: Litigation against health-care providers has reached crisis levels, causing practitioners to shun medical specialities, including obstetrics and gynaecology, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said yesterday.
“The nature of the crisis is that our country is experiencing a very sharp increase – actually an explosion – in medical malpractice litigation, which is not in keeping with generally known trends of negligence or malpractice,” Motsoaledi said in Pretoria.
“The cost of medical malpractice claims has skyrocketed and the number of claims increased substantially.”
Addressing a medico-legal summit in Pretoria, Motsoaledi said that when the trend was initially observed, doctors in public service were blamed for rendering shoddy service.
“Let me make it very clear, the crisis we are faced with is not a crisis of public health care. It is a crisis faced by everybody in the health-care profession – public and private. It does not matter where you are,” said Motsoaledi.
Specific medical specialities were targeted.
“There are four medical specialities that are continually, persistently and mercilessly being targeted for litigation. These are neonatology, orthopaedics, obstetrics and gynaecology and neurosurgery.”
The trend was significantly detrimental to the health-care system and the cost of indemnity insurance for private specialists in neurosurgery had increased by “a whopping 573 percent” within eight years between 2005 and 2013.
“The cost of indemnity insurance for private specialists in obstetrics increased by 382 percent within a similar period and is still growing.
“All these issues have devastating consequences for the healthcare system of a country.”
Motsoaledi said young doctors were now reluctant to specialise in obstetrics and gynaecology.
“Those who are too old to change are resorting to procrastinating gynaecology and refuse to see the woman once she falls pregnant,” he said.
Motsoaledi said lawyers leading the litigation against medical practitioners were not doing it for the love of patients.
“They are driven by this pocket-lining phenomenon. They are simply in hospitals because the platform from which they have been lining their pockets, and not that of the wronged patients, has now changed.
“Yes, the Road Accident Fund ( RAF) has changed. It has been bankrupted by this pocket-lining behaviour,” said Motsoaledi.
Numerous countries had faced similar problems. “It is the same crisis that occurred in the US in the early 1970s, which was described as a crisis of insurance availability as many insurers exited.
“The second crisis in the mid-1980s was one of affordability, with price hikes that meant doctors found they could not afford to pay for cover.”
He said the problem had also been experienced in the UK and Australia.