30 April 2009
editorial
Johannesburg — REMEMBER the 2007 public sector strike? One of the issues in that strike was the occupation specific dispensation (OSD) that the government had promised would improve pay and provide career progression for public servants who did their jobs properly and deserved to progress.
At the time the strike began, the Treasury had already put aside billions of rands for the OSD for teachers but the Department of Education hadn't got it together to structure the package. The strike prompted hasty action and these days teachers, and other professionals in the public service such as prosecutors and nurses, have their OSD.
Not so the doctors who work in SA's public hospitals. The Department of Health should have known for at least the past two years that this was an accident waiting to happen. It's not just that public sector doctors earn less than their private counterparts but that the conditions in public hospitals are often so dire that their working lives are tough in the extreme. There are too many vacant posts as it is: those in charge of public healthcare dare not ignore doctors' legitimate grievances.
True, the department promised a new dispensation for doctors in July and talks have been going on in the health sector bargaining chamber. It's true too that the doctors who went on strike in about 26 hospitals, many of them juniors and interns, did so despite the talks. The South African Medical Association, which represents doctors, distanced itself from the strike, and rightly so, in our view.
Protest is one thing; a three-week wildcat strike is quite another, especially when it involves doctors. Doctors at Cape Town's Red Cross hospital, for example, wore black in protest but did not strike. Plenty of doctors, many more senior (and much more underpaid) than the strikers, stayed at their posts and did not risk the lives of patients.
Keeping people alive and well
is surely the most essential service of all. What kind of culture can prevail in our public hospitals, and even our medical schools, that young doctors think it is OK to walk out on their posts and their patients for weeks on end? More money, on its own, is not going to fix that culture deficit. We need some dedication in our doctors.
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