Cape Town - The Western Cape Health Department said its recruitment drive is in top gear to combat an anticipated shortage of staff as 1019 health-care workers across 97 institutions in the Western Cape were recorded as having been infected with Covid-19 as of January 5.
A statement from the department said: “This brings the number of staff infections since the start of the pandemic to 7246. This in turn has resulted in 37795 days lost as staff needed to take sick leave while isolating.”
Premier Alan Winde said: “The Western Cape’s recruitment drive for health-care workers, which aims to recruit over 1300 health-care workers to assist our platform, has now resulted in 558 applications. As a result, 485 offers have been made, and the first 80 started on January 4.
“All applicants have been processed and appointments are being made in a staggered manner. The appointments include doctors, nurses, allied health workers, pharmacists, social workers and some admin-related staff,” said Winde.
People manager at Groote Schuur Hospital Mercy Lazarus said: “As additional wards were being urgently commissioned during the start of the second wave, we started to build additional staff capacity on Christmas Eve.
“Through strong support from our head office colleagues, we were able to fill many contract posts by New Year’s Day, a week after starting recruitment. We were able to quickly fill these posts due to a boundary-less and unrestricted relationship we have with our colleagues, where we could contact them at any time of the day that they would readily assist us to ensure the front-line support needed,” said Lazarus.
Meanwhile, the department’s chief directorate of people management, in collaboration with the directorate of information management, has developed a people planning and staffing (PPS) dashboard.
Dashboard developer Peter Smith said: “This allows for the daily integration of data from various systems alongside the staff infection rate and bed capacity to determine any staff gap report.”
Mitchells Plain Field Hospital people manager Allen Pretorius said: “Our team has been invested in this collaborative and collective drive to ensure that new staff were ready when the new beds were opened.”
Nehawu’s Western Cape provincial secretary, Eric Kweleta, said: “We want to welcome the move to employ additional staff but internships are not enough as we want all vacant positions to be filled on a permanent basis.
“Furthermore, we hope that the new intake would be welcomed into conducive conditions where all necessary PPE (personal protective equipment) is in place,” said Kweleta.
Cape Argus