Caring for doctors is caring for the community – RuDASA

Abstract

Take two dedicated, efficient doctor/managers out of the mix at a deep rural district hospital and the local healthcare system begins to implode, leaving a nursing manager scrambling to re-assign remaining staff while the local population is left with the prospect of little more than a mediocre day hospital.
The story of the 180-bed Madwaleni Hospital in the Mbashe sub-district (with a population of 262 000, and rated the eighth most deprived sub-district in the country) of Amathole on the north Eastern Cape coast, with its 33 attendant clinics, is a cautionary tale which sadly epitomizes so much of South Africa’s human resources for health crisis.
That an entire community’s health needs can turn on the personal life of a single clinical manager (who left in February last year to marry a woman in Johannesburg where he was promptly offered a top multi-facetted academic post), portrays the historical neglect of the country’s health care staffing.