The massive nationwide increase in the number of nurse and doctor vacancies over the past year warrants immediate action. In five provinces where data from both 2008 and 2009 has been made available via parliamentary replies, we have seen a 40.5% increase in nursing vacancies and a 4.1% increase in doctor's vacancies. We believe this indicates that the Health Ministry needs to develop a new national recruitment strategy, remove the moratorium on the issuing of visas to health workers from SADC countries, and implement a series of policy changes needed to increase the number of training institutions.
The data now publicly available provides for a comparative analysis of the situation in only the Eastern Cape, Free State, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape, as the Health Department did not provide data for the other four provinces in both 2008 and 2009. Still, this provides a useful snapshot of the overall picture countrywide.
The number of vacancies for doctors and nurses has increased in the five provinces where comparative data was available from 30,026 in 2008 to 40,592 in 2009. The number of vacancies for nurses has increased from 25,650 to 36,035 - a 40.5% increase. The number of vacancies for doctors has increased by 4.1%, from 4,376 to 4,557.
The problem is most acute in the Eastern Cape, where we have seen a massive year-on-year vacancy increase of 282%. Vacancies for doctors and nurses in the province jumped from 6,492 in 2008 to 27,171 vacancies for both professions in 2009. This points to a severe deterioration of the situation in that province, and demonstrates how significantly the ANC administration in the Eastern Cape is failing to address healthcare problems in that province.
The number of vacancies in 2009 is lowest in the Western Cape, at 158 for doctors and 465 for nurses, though no information from the Western Cape was supplied to the DA question in 2008.
The problem of vacancies needs to be tackled head-on with a dynamic plan to increase the number of doctors and nurses available to our health system and, more importantly, retain them. We need to: