The Gauteng health department has coughed up more than R1bn in negligence cases involving 35 public health institutions in two years, the DA’s provincial spokesperson on health, Jack Bloom, said on Tuesday.
The province’s health budget grew from R37.6bn in 2016 to R40.2bn in 2017 but the health department had not budgeted for negligence costs.
Since 2015, the department had paid out R1,017,278,937 in 185 legal cases of disease and death caused by negligence, across the province.
Bloom said there were far too many cases happening all the time, and that no disciplinary action had been taken against any of the staff involved.
In 2016, the health department’s legal fees amounted to R569m, and legal claims have been piling up since 2009. As a result, legal fees have taken up the bulk of the department’s budget, even into the new financial year, according to Bloom.
About 50 of the total cases were related to cerebral palsy and brain damage at birth, which cost R769m. The others pertained to blindness, paraplegia, negligence in the provision of medication and specifically the deaths of 13 babies.
Most cases covered by the R514m were at Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital. They involved legal payouts for 44 matters, two-thirds of which were cases pertaining to cerebral palsy at birth. The rest were for the deaths of babies, amputations, blindness, paraplegia and a nurse that left a cleaning pad inside a patient’s womb.
"There is something drastically wrong at that hospital’s maternity ward," said Bloom, in reference to Baragwanath. "We have a large budget but we cannot give people the right kind of care."
In May, health MEC Gwen Ramakgopa said the department had saved about R61m in medicolegal claims through mediation. She said the department had conducted a legal audit in order to get to the bottom of the escalation in claims.
"The mediation process forms part of the department’s alternative dispute resolutions, which are yielding positive results" she said.
However, at a recent health consultative forum, Ramakgopa conceded that Gauteng’s R40bn health budget was insufficient and that the department could not carry out the tasks required of it because of its sizeable debt.
Bloom said potential medicolegal claims could amount to R13bn for the province if all those affected brought their cases before the courts.
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