Evidence of doctors' health minister at last.

Fragmented health care services are responsible for South Africa's dismal infant and maternal mortality rates while budgets are being greedily consumed by bloated and inefficient administrations that sideline clinicians at the coalface. New Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi said this to 200 doctors at Groote Schuur Hospital while sharing how he plans to turn the floundering health care ship around after 'discovering that problems went much deeper than I realised'. In an address none of his audience dreamed possible during the debilitating tenure of his long-standing predecessor, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, Motsoaledi outdid some of his department's detractors in sharing horror stories. 'Journalists say that with the exception of the Western Cape, the whole health system has collapsed. There's no oxygen there, no theatre gloves here …. We read about patients being left in hot baths, heaters left on and burning them, patients lost in the premises and found dead … it would be foolhardy to challenge these stories, because in most cases they're true.' As importantly, he shared in some detail what he's done and what he plans to do to address them, shocking into momentary silence the most hardened cynics and offering hope to the 'Manto-weary' among his mainly public sector audience. Motsoaledi was invited to address the doctors by the South African Medical Association (SAMA) during the bruising occupation-specific dispensation (OSD) negotiations in June and July last year. He was speaking on 23 November. He said doctors should never have to think about striking again and gave his audience 'a guarantee that I won't force you to go to the edge – up to today nobody's been able to tell me why the OSD was not implemented last year (2008). One doctor said that 'nowhere' in the department's human resources plan was there 'ever any consideration or mention of recruiting the amount of doctors we are currently losing in the system' and asked how he planned to address this. Motsoaledi appealed to his colleagues to help him 'recruit doctors back here', but said he believed the solution lay in 'creating as much as we can locally' (training more doctors). He said he was hamstrung by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries protocol preventing recruitment from most African countries. He was last August 'attacked as the culprit' at an SADC meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, for 'stealing doctors'. 'We debated charging countries for every doctor going to the First …