Hon House Chair and hon members, it is both an honour and a pleasure for me to present to this House for a second reading a very important Bill, namely the National Health Amendment Bill. The deteriorating quality of health care in our public hospitals has been a thorn in the flesh of our country for quite some time. For this term of office of government, it was illustriously captured by the President of the country during his very first state of the nation address in 2009. He said:
Fellow South Africans, we are seriously concerned about the deterioration of the quality of health care, aggravated by the steady increase in the burden of disease in the past decade and a half.
As a department, we have set ourselves clear goals and objectives, as set out in the Negotiated Service Delivery Agreement. These four goals are: increasing life expectancy; decreasing maternal and child mortality rates; combating HIV and Aids and tuberculosis; and strengthening health system effectiveness.
While we have experienced tremendous progress in the first three outcomes, as evidenced by the events in Washington DC at the International Aids Conference three weeks ago, we experience very serious and disturbing challenges with respect to the fourth outcome, which is the effectiveness of the health care system. We have identified five areas where we need to deal with this issue of the effectiveness of the health care system. I will deal with only one of these five outcomes today, which is the issue of quality. The others, of course, are infrastructure, human resources, the re- engineering of primary health care and the cost of health care in the country.
There will be many debates as to what constitutes quality and what leads to deterioration. However, under this Act, we have decided to focus on six standards, which we call core standards. They are very basic, minimum standards. We believe no facility should be called a health facility if they are not able to comply with these basic standards. We thought that in order to be sure that these standards were adhered to we needed to establish a well-oiled and well-structured institution whose sole purpose is to ensure and enforce these standards. Today, we are presenting to this House a Bill to do exactly that.
The Bill is intended to amend the existing National Health Act to establish a public entity called the Office of Health Standards Compliance, OHSC. This body or entity, styled along the same lines as the British Quality Care Commission, will have three units. The first unit will be the Inspectorate. In terms of this Bill, it will be mandatory for this unit to inspect each and every public health facility on a regular basis. The problematic ones will be inspected as often as possible so that they are monitored frequently to avoid deterioration until there is a crisis, as is now happening in some hospitals around Gauteng, Limpopo and the Eastern Cape.
We would like to avoid as much as possible the deterioration that we are now seeing in three of our provinces. We have already sent 20 individuals to Britain to be trained as inspectors of our facilities. During the public hearings, people were often confusing these inspectors with environmental care inspectors or the inspectors who were called health inspectors in the past. In terms of this Bill, there will still be environmental health inspectors in the system, but the inspectors we are referring to will specifically inspect quality standards, including the six core standards that I mentioned earlier. The environmental care inspectors will still be there to work on issues pertaining to the environment. Once inspected, the facilities will be graded from grade A to grade F and the report will be released publicly.
The second unit will be a Health Ombudsperson. This unit will function as an area where members of the public will lodge complaints about the negative experiences they might have encountered during their visits to health facilities. These complaints will range from poor staff attitudes, long waiting times or the nonavailability of drugs to safety and security, etc.
Again there has been confusion during public hearings about the role of the ombudsperson vis--vis professional bodies like the Health Professions Council of South Africa, HPCSA, the SA Nursing Council, SANC, and the SA Pharmacy Council, SAPC. These professional bodies usually deal with individual professional misconduct like negligence, unethical behaviour or unprofessional behaviour. It is usually well-to-do people in society who know about these professional bodies and how to approach them. Ordinary members of the public are usually at a loss.
As the department, we did not fold our arms and wait for this entity to be launched in terms of this Bill in order to act. As early as April this year, we trained at least 40 individuals and divided them into what we call facility improvement teams. They have been moving from district to district to help institutions to improve basic standards of care. They have made progress but, unfortunately, their work is often overshadowed by extremely disturbing events generating severe negative publicity in the three provinces I mentioned earlier. We will try to increase the teams and expedite their involvement in these particular provinces.
We have even identified 400 unemployed graduates in three major fields - finance and accounting, human resources and information communications technology. These 400 unemployed graduates have undergone training in governance by the Public Administration Leadership and Management Academy, Palama. We have divided them into teams of 45 each and dispatched them to various provinces to help in the fields of supply chain management, asset reconciliation and the management of human resources, especially in the cleaning up of Persal, or the public salary management system, in our provinces. They started work in April this year and we hope to see changes brought about by their work in a short space of time. We hope that given the establishment of the Office of Health Standards Compliance, our institutions will be on tenterhooks.
There have often been debates in the public about whether our health care institutions or the individuals managing them are ever held accountable for their actions. We have pointed out that they were held accountable, but without a clear legal framework or an institution that would monitor them. However, we do sometimes experience problems. Now each and every health facility manager will have to take full accountability and responsibility for his or her actions or omissions that may lead to any of the adverse events that our facilities have experienced way too often. So, I appeal to members of this House to please support this Bill. [Applause.]