With just two weeks to go until community service doctors and medical interns are due to take up posts that open on July 1, the health department has yet to begin accepting applications, leaving hundreds of aspirant healthcare professionals in limbo.
The situation could delay dozens of young medical school graduates from qualifying as doctors and deprive clinics and hospitals of much-needed staff, particularly in rural areas.
It is directly at odds with an assurance health minister Joe Phaahla gave parliament that all community service doctors would be allocated posts at least a month before they were due to start work.
In a written reply to a series of questions recently posed by DA MP Haseena Ismail about community service doctors, the minister said: “The department acknowledges that due to budget challenges in the past few years, the results were released almost two weeks before the work commencement date, which inconvenienced movement of some applicants.
“However, the department has since put mechanisms in place to ensure that all SA citizens’ and permanent residents’ future applicants are allocated and appointed into positions within a reasonable period that is at least a month before their work commencement date.”
Doctors are required to complete six years of university study, two years of internship in which they rotate through disciplines such as obstetrics and psychiatry, and 12 months of community service before they qualify. If they do not complete community service, they can neither practise medicine nor undertake further study to specialise. Community service is also a requirement for 16 other healthcare disciplines, including pharmacists, psychologists, physiotherapists and professional nurses.
They are required to submit their applications for internship and community service on the health department’s online portal, which as of Thursday still carried a notice saying the 2022 midyear cycle was not yet open.
The health department’s director for human resources information systems, Victor Khanyile, said the system will open next week, but could not specify the date.
Applicants will have a three-day window in which to submit their documents, and they can expect a response within 48 hours, he said.
Between 200 and 300 applications were anticipated, he said, emphasising that most community service and intern posts were filled in January.
The midyear intake is a “mop-up operation” to cater for people who needed extra time to complete all their study blocks, he said.
Phaahla told parliament that 124 doctors were to be allocated community service posts in the midyear cycle and that 2,176 doctors were assigned community service posts in the January intake.
His written reply to Ismail’s questions is dated May 27 and was published by parliament on June 10.
SA’s biggest doctor organisation, the SA Medical Association (Sama), said it was prepared to take legal action if the national health department did not resolve the matter swiftly.
“They should not open this process one to two weeks before [posts commence]. They should have started this work in May or June,” said Sama’s Employed Doctors Forum chair, Akhtar Hussain.
“Because of their incompetence and leadership failures, our interns are suffering. For them [the health department], a delay is nothing, but for junior doctors it is a big concern.
“By next week, if nothing is done, we will have to take legal action against the department of health, because we can see how much trouble they are causing for junior doctors and their families,” he said.
Internships are usually completed in cities, while community service is more likely to be conducted in rural areas, and often requires doctors to relocate. Community service doctors need time to find suitable, secure accommodation, said Hussein.
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