Money for health services diverted to pay legal costs

Hundreds of millions of rand meant for essential health services are being diverted to cover medico-legal claims against the Eastern Cape department of health.

This includes money meant for medication, staffing and infrastructure.

The department’s annual report for the 2018-19 financial year — released two weeks ago — shows that the provincial government is saddled with R29bn in medico-legal claims.

Health MEC Sindiswa Gomba said her department simply did not have the budget to deal with these claims, which was why it dipped into money meant for service delivery.

In the health committee’s report, tabled in the Bhisho legislature, it stated that the health administration and management subdivision had under-spent its budget by R48.5m on its services as money had to be diverted to the legal claims.

“The medico-legal claims continue to considerably negatively affect spending towards primary healthcare service delivery,” the report says.

The district health services division paid out a whopping R447.12m in medico-claims while provincial hospitals paid out R70.44m.

Central and tertiary hospital services paid out R45.62m and the health science and training division settled an amount of R60.38m. The department of health care support services shelled out R6.36m and the health facilities management section spent R396,000 on medico-legal claims.

“The money may be for medication, staffing, infrastructure because once a court settles [a case and orders us to pay] you must pay,” Gomba said.

“There’s no budget in any institution to deal with medico-legal claims because they are an event that occurs because of mishaps. One of the strategies we've adopted is to move medico-legal claims to the premier’s office so that the department does not suffer the consequence of litigation.

“Even if it’s not negligence, as long as we’re dealing with people and service delivery there will be litigation so rather all those issues move to the premier’s office, are dealt with there so they don’t hamper service delivery in the department,” Gomba said.

Medico-legal claims have been a recurring problem in the province with the number of claims having almost doubled from 2018.

Taxpayers in the province have forked out more than R324m to the state attorney’s office in the last five years to defend the department of health against medico-legal claims.

This is while an accrual of more than R450m to defend medico-legal and negligence claims instituted against the cash-strapped provincial health department was also billed.