Coming soon: nowhere to hide for hospital managers

Abstract

Hospital and health care managers and administrators will in future be measured against mandatory core standards and judged on outcomes, with little place to hide and less room to shift responsibility, the country’s new standards certification chief warned last month.
Dr Carol Marshal, Director of the Office of Healthcare Standards Compliance (OHSC), in the national Department of Health has the full backing of her Director General, Precious Matsotso. This emerged in a speech the pair co-wrote for a health care safety conference in Cape Town last month. It became clear from the speech, delivered on Matsoso’s behalf by Marshal and in a later interview with Marshal, that the ‘slap on the wrist’ approach – driven by a plethora of patient safety policies/guidelines and the absence of a uniform, credible means of probing health care delivery problems – could soon be history.