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SAMA claims that health workers are working jobs for which they are unskilled.
Thomas Lohnes / Getty Images
- Herman Mashaba and Action SA have started a #HireMedicalHeroes campaign and say that close to 300 unemployed healthcare workers have signed up.
- In a webinar with Mashaba, Dr. Angelique Coetzee from the South African Medical Association said that research was needed on abolishing unfunded vacancies.
- Coetzee expressed concern about nurses who were forced to work in the ICU when they were not trained to do so.
The South African Medical Association (SAMA) says it is concerned by reports that, during the Covid-19 pandemic, medical personnel were being employed at levels of care where they had no experience.
“What caught the attention of SAMA is that in the ICU, which is a highly specialized unit, you cannot hire any nurse in an ICU ward; you need to be trained for it.
“If you put the staff in a unit for which they are not adequately trained, you not only compromise the care of the patient, but you are also taking away their dignity because she (the nurse) does not know what to do and she is also afraid to say ‘ I don’t know ‘because it could become an unemployment statistic, “said SAMA president Dr. Angelique Coetzee.
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Coetzee added that it was also important that those in management positions in the health sector have experience.
Coetzee spoke during a webinar, hosted by former Johannesburg Mayor and Action SA founder Herman Mashaba, which focused on the issues faced by unemployed healthcare workers and healthcare workers.
Coetzee said that an investigation was needed into the abolition of unfunded medical vacancies in hospitals, an attempt to make hospitals and provinces look “artificially better on paper” because there are no unfilled vacancies.
She said:
“One of the indicators in the national department of health is its vacancy rate, so if your vacancy rate is artificially reducing to a 1-2% level, by taking the unfunded positions and abolishing them, then you see very well on paper. So it seems that there are not many publications that were put on moratorium. “
“We would like to ask the national Department of Health to set up a task force for us to review the statistics for the last 20 years to see how many publications have been turned into unfunded publications and then abolished so that everything on paper looks better. . “
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During the webinar, anonymous healthcare workers sent voice recordings to express their complaints. One said:
“We nurses are the most affected and we are on the front lines of this pandemic. Most of our colleagues are getting infected and have to quit smoking. We have lost colleagues and we are not receiving the kind of support we expected to get from the department. The pressure to hide things from the public is even greater. “
The health worker said the nursing council was also putting pressure on them.
“We are doing our best with what we have … Coping with the carnage that the disease has caused is not easy for everyone. It affects us, our families, our private lives and, above all, our health mental. well-being. We can’t go on like this, “he said.
Her feelings came home for Mashaba, who said she hadn’t seen her sister, also a health worker, in two months.
“Hearing this audio and hearing it for the first time, it actually brings back painful memories. As I speak to you and South Africans, my sister is in quarantine. She is a qualified professional nurse who graduated in the 70s and works in an environment very infectious and toxic, “he said.
On Sunday, Mashaba and Action SA launched the #HireMedicalHeroes campaign in response to the frozen medical posts. He said that so far more than 300 unemployed health workers have signed up for the campaign.
