Durban - CUBAN doctors brought in by the government to assist during the Covid-19 pandemic would remain on duty in South Africa now that the country has moved to level 1 of the lockdown.
This was announced yesterday by Health MEC Nomagugu Simelane-Zulu.
“We are going to continue to use them in our own hospitals We still have work that can and should be done by these Cuban doctors. When we received the brigade of 27 Cuban doctors, a few were epidemiologists. We are running out of those we don’t have enough in KwaZulu-Natal and we don’t have enough in the private sector. Sometimes we cannot afford those in the private sector as there is a particular scale of payment that can be conducted.”
The MEC said the Cuban brigade came with specialists the department did not have or could not recruit due to financial constraints. Most of the Cuban doctors were sent to rural KZN hospitals because local doctors did not want to go those areas. The Cubans would continue to go to rural areas as long as their contracts were active.
“Should a second wave come, we will still have them within the system and be able to use them,” she said.
The issue of the Cuban doctors has been a hot topic after the national Health Department earlier this year received a group of about 217 epidemiologists, family physicians, biotechnology experts, healthcare technology engineers, and biostatisticians who came at a cost of about R440million.
SA Medical Association KZN spokesperson Dr Zanele Bikitsha said they did not have a problem with the Cuban doctors staying in the country. She said Sama’s main problem was that there were doctors struggling to get employment and waiting for months to be placed at hospitals for training, while the country had a poor doctor-to-patient ratio. Bikitsha disagreed that South Africa does not have the required skills. She said the government should embark on an effort to encourage such skills.
National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union spokesperson Khaya Xaba agreed, saying: “We believe these doctors are doing well. They assist a lot because our doctors refuse to go to rural areas because they don’t get a rural allowance. We hope government will keep these workers much longer”
Premier Sihle Zikalala said there had been a drastic decline in coronavirus cases in the province. The median was 233 cases a day. KZN had had 117569 cases, with just over 7000 still active. There had been 2531 deaths and 108004 recoveries - a 92% recovery rate.
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