Pretoria - The government wants no patient who visits any of its clinics to wait for more than two hours by 2019 and to ensure that they receive the best care available.
At the launch of the second phase of Operation Phakisa in the city on Tuesday, Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi said most South Africans received health care services at the country’s 3 500 clinics, but these did not function well.
No new clinics will be built for the project, but the existing ones will be improved and turned into ideal facilities.
The first phase of the project was about unlocking the oceans economy.
Motsoaledi said the current clinic models did not work because of poor financial management, poor infrastructure, supply chain and the hiring of wrong people into wrong positions.
“When departments are put into administration, it is always the health departments. The health sector is big and if you do not have the right people dealing with the finances then there would be problems,” he said.
Motsoaledi hopes Operation Phakisa will be able to improve the health care system.
President Jacob Zuma said the ideal clinic would “be a clinic that opens on time in the morning, according to its set operating hours, and which does not close until the last patient has been assisted, even if this is beyond the normal closing hours”.
Zuma said clinics would be staffed by health care providers who treat patients with dignity.
To make this goal a reality, he said, over the last five weeks a team of 164 senior managers from national, provincial and local governments participated in an Operation Phakisa laboratory to come up with ways of running ideal clinics. The team concentrated on service delivery, waiting times, human resources, infrastructure and financial management among other things.
Pretoria News