Fix department’s negligence instead of trying to stop payouts

The Eastern Cape health department is looking at ways to reduce the enormous number of medico-legal negligence claims it is facing. The need to do so is obvious. It has reportedly paid out over R3bn  in just six years with a further R4bn being absorbed by accruals from previous years.

It faces a further R37bn worth of claims for which it has already received summons.

This province is responsible for more than a quarter of the medicolegal negligence claims levelled against the nine provincial health departments in the country.

It is simply not sustainable and yet nothing changes. It just seems to get worse.

The politicians and administrators insist that at least some of these claims are either bogus or inflated. If this is so, it is an even worse indictment against the department and begs the question about how these claims succeed in court. It can only be because representatives of either the state attorneys’ office or the health department  —  or both — are either utterly useless or complicit in an ugly cycle of corruption.

Recently appointed health MEC Nomakhosazana Meth has the Special Investigating Unit working with the department to try and root out fraudulent or inflated negligence claims.

The SIU approach appears to involve interdicting court ordered payments to caregivers of children born with terrible disabilities due to negligence at provincial hospitals. It does so citing vague allegations of corruption or that the department had not conducted its defence robustly. Not surprisingly, courts are not buying this approach.

The department is following a similar approach seeking to interdict lump sum payments of over R500,000 to victims of medical negligence. It has indicated it will, instead, ask courts to allow it to pay damages out over three to eight years and with no interest on the capital amount. 

In effect, it will need to change existing law and courts are as unlikely to buy into this approach as they were to heed the SIU’s feeble attempts.

The department needs to focus its energy on addressing the problem of its serial negligence rather than to try and curtail the damages payouts awarded to people negatively affected by that negligence, many of whom pay with lifelong health issues.

If our clinics and hospitals were efficiently run, staffed with the necessary medical expertise and adequately stocked with medicines and equipment, negligence claims would, as a matter of course, decrease significantly.

Hopefully, the department’s new superintendent general, Dr Rolene Wagner, will focus on fixing the unit's own ineptitude rather than on trying to curtail its consequences.