BL Premium reports that Life Healthcare has urged the government to fix SA’s desperate shortage of health-care professionals before it embarks on the sweeping financing reforms proposed in the National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill, currently before parliament.

NHI is the government’s plan for achieving universal health coverage, which aims to ensure patients receive care that is free at the point of delivery, paid for by a central NHI Fund. Life Healthcare CEO Peter Wharton-Hood said the company supported the philosophy of universal health coverage, but not the way the government planned to achieve it. “The HR [human resources] problem needs to be solved, and it needs to be solved fast. Unless you have enough doctors and nurses, and capable managers, hospitals won’t function. The debate around financing is not worth having until the building blocks are in place,” he said on Thursday. SA is short of 20,000 nurses and 13,000 doctors, he indicated. “There is no clear plan to close that gap. We [private hospitals] are denied the opportunity to train nurses the way we used to. Nurses are not even on the critical skills list,” Wharton-Hood lamented.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Tamar Kahn & Nico Gous at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)

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