DURBAN - EThekwini Municipality has started the process to hand over 59 clinics under its administration to the KwaZulu-Natal department of health.
The process was announced at the eThekwini executive committee (exco) meeting by the community services committee (CSC) chairperson Zama Sokhabase on Tuesday.
The first clinic to be moved would be Cato Manor Health Care Centre as some of the services were already rendered by the provincial department. The CSC was implementing a council resolution which was taken in 2012 that all the clinics under the city must be handed back to the province because it was not the city’s competence to run clinical health care.
Sokhabase said the city’s staff work until 4pm, in comparison to the provincial staff who work night and day shifts to cover the 24 hours. Sokhabase explained that if the city staff continue to work after hours, it would mean they should be paid overtime.
She also raised the issue that city staff were earning more than the provincial staff, and remuneration packages and other benefits would have to be discussed with unions before staff would be transferred.
Sokhabase said the city had no capacity to deal with major health issues so its mandate was to only cover environmental health which has to do with inspecting shops and restaurants.
“People must understand that our clinics have no capacity to operate 24 hours and that is the work of the provincial health department, which is responsible for clinical health care. Secondly, it was of the unfunded responsibilities which the city was incurring cost for,” said Sokhabase.
Out of 111 clinics in eThekwini, 53 were directly under the provincial department of health while 59 were run by the city.
Sokhabase said that all of them would eventually move to the province, but the process would take time since the city still had to negotiate with staff through their unions and also discuss what would happen to the staff that might refuse to fall under the department.
The announcement sparked debate among the opposition, who argued that the problems facing the health-care sector would not be resolved by transferring clinics to the province.
The EFF’s Thabani Miya accused the city of not wanting to pay overtime to people servicing sick people while making overtime payments to the metro police, some of which were irregular.
DA exco chairperson Nicole Graham argued that handing over the clinics to the province would not mean that its problem had been solved.
Graham said the municipality still had an obligation to provide health-care services to the people anyway.
Daily News