Q&A

Rocketing medical negligence claims are threatening to bankrupt provincial health departments. Chris Barron asked national minister of health AARON MOTSOALEDI …

You’ve been promising to tackle this for years. Why haven’t you?

We are tackling it. Results have not yet come to the fore.

Is it more difficult than you thought?

It’s extremely complex. But quite a number of things are coming.

What are the most important?

There’s a lot of fraud and false claims. The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) have given me a preliminary report which I’m not at liberty to disclose today.

Four years ago you said allegations that hospital managers were tipping off lawyers were going to be investigated. Were they?

We have given this to the SIU, to the Hawks. It’s part of the investigation.

Didn’t you give this to them four years ago?

No. If you remember the SIU just started quite recently.

Didn’t you say the allegations would be investigated urgently?

We could not make any breakthrough because these were anecdotes and nobody was forthcoming.

Does this mean most of the “false claims” could be legitimate?

I can’t say most. We still need to analyse them. All we know is quite a number of them are things that happened up to 20 years ago.

The claims could still be legitimate, can’t they?

Not all of them, definitely. One of the problems we’re having is filing. The filing system we have in our hospitals, which we are busy changing, is absolutely not adequate to deal with those. Records are not there. And if there are no records, judges rule in favour of the plaintiffs.

Didn’t the Treasury allocate R30m for you to send expert teams to assist provincial health departments with admin?

It’s a myth that Treasury gave us R30m this financial year. We were given R5m …

Have you sent any expert teams?

We’ve been assisting the provinces for a long time. But now that this thing is growing so big we need to outsource it to a company that will bring together a team of physicians, a team of senior counsel, a team of private investigators, a team of researchers, a team of analysts. Those teams are starting on Monday.

Why is the number of claims so much lower in the Western Cape?

Some years back they hired a retired senior counsel who’s also a physician to help them.

Couldn’t other provincial health departments have done the same?

I asked other provinces to try and do the same … Unfortunately, many of them did not do it. Those who did chose wrong people and it produced no results or even became worse.

Could the lower claims be because the hospitals there are better?

Well, Western Cape has good staffing, so they’re better off.

Could this problem sink National Health Insurance?

No health-care system can carry this type of thing.

So must it be sorted out before starting NHI?

Everybody says every other thing must be sorted out before NHI. I don’t know the meaning of that.