Health minister Joe Phaahla moved on Tuesday to assure unemployed doctors that the state has found the money to hire them, with details to be announced in the finance minister’s budget speech next week.
Newly qualified doctors have been protesting for the past two months over the state’s inability to provide them with posts in the public sector, which the minister said last week was due to budget constraints. The state would hire them if it could, but it just didn’t have the money, he said at the time.
But in a surprise turn of events, he announced on Tuesday that a plan had been made to fund more posts.
“Our national team is working with National Treasury to thrash out the details and working with provincial health department[s] to speed up the process so that by April 1 all those who will not be already in posts can start,” Phaahla said during a parliamentary debate on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address.
“I am confident that with this certainty, provinces will be able to start giving appointment letters even before April 1 2024. The measures we are working on with the minister of finance will give us sufficient breathing space while we are working on long-term solutions,” he said, without elaborating.
The health department was not focusing solely on doctors, and was doing everything it could to retain as many other healthcare professionals as it could in the public sector, he said.
Medical graduates are required to complete two years of internship and one year of community service before they can register with the Health Professions Council of SA and practice independently. While in the past doctors who had completed community service readily found posts in the public sector, budget constraints on provincial health departments have constrained their ability to make new appointments, even as the number of students graduating from medical schools has soared.
The number of medical graduates has almost doubled over the past decade, said the minister. In 2014 the state employed 1,338 medical interns: this year the figure stood at 2,210. He previously indicated the number of community service doctors had increased from 1,340 in 2020 to 2,101 in 2024.
On Monday unemployed doctors marched to the KwaZulu-Natal provincial health department offices in protest at the lack of jobs. There were similar protests in Pretoria in January.
Provincial health departments are under financial pressure because they have to honour last year’s higher-than-anticipated wage deal, which left the Treasury with a R37bn shortfall. It implemented unprecedented in-year cuts in the medium-term budget policy statement in November, and signalled worse was to come over the medium term, prompting provincial health departments to put the brakes on new hires.
Last week senior clinicians wrote an open letter to the finance minister urging him to reverse the budget cuts, saying the hiring freeze imposed in provinces such as Western Cape was not only harming patients but jeopardising training.
kahnt@businesslive.co.za
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