Durban - The South African Nursing Council(SANC) raised concerns in a circular last week that nursing practitioners who failed to include a reference number with their annual fees payments would be removed from the register if not corrected.
In circular 9 of 2022, Sizo Mchunu, SANC registrar and CEO, said there had been growing concern regarding the payments made by nurse practitioners who failed to include their SANC reference number together with the service they are paying for.
Mchunu said the circular sought to outline the process that should be followed to trace and reallocate incorrectly referenced payments or payments that were made without any reference whatsoever.
She said, during the 2022 Annual Practising Certificate season, the SANC received a high number of payments for annual fees which were not properly referenced.
Many of these payments could not be allocated to the nurse practitioners’ SANC membership accounts, she said.
As a result, Mchunu said the nurse practitioners could not be issued with their annual practising certificates and were removed from the register for non-payment of annual fees.
“We urge the nurse practitioners who know that they have made payments for their 2022 annual fees but are removed from the register for non-payment of fees to urgently contact the SANC so that we can assist them in tracing their payments, and where successful, allocate the payments to their SANC membership account,” she said.
The South African Nursing Council uses the Reference Deposit Account for payment of Fees and Fines payable by its stakeholders.
The reference consists of two parts:
- The SANC reference number (8 digits) – which is used to identify who the payment is for.
- A payment type code (7 CAPITAL LETTERS) written immediately after the SANC reference number – which is used for identifying what the payment is for.
It said for example the reference when making annual fee payment could be :12345678ANLFEES, with the numbers reflecting the nurse practitioner’s SANC reference number, and ‘ANLFEES‘ is the payment type code, which combined is always 15 characters long.
SANC also warned that in terms of Section 44 (2)(b) of the Nursing Act, a person whose name has been removed from the register must cease to practise as a nurse practitioner and is precluded from performing any act which he or she, in his or her capacity as a registered person, was entitled to perform.
Affected nurse practitioners are required to send their proof of payment (full details of recipient, banking details etc) and SANC reference number to [email protected] or [email protected]. Bank statements will not be accepted as proof of payment.