Ramaphosa addresses ‘arrogance’ of healthcare workers in public sector

President Cyril Ramaphosa says there needs to be more training of the country’s public healthcare workers to help them practice more compassion and eliminate the “arrogance” that many have sometimes been meted out against patients as a result of being overworked and underpaid.

He said that this will be one of the main issues that will be addressed if the country was going to achieve a world-class primary healthcare sector.

Ramaphosa was speaking at the Presidential Health Summit that was held in Johannesburg this week.

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Sufficiently staffed

“Such a health care system should be sufficiently staffed, with healthcare professionals, who are dedicated and the types [of characters] we saw during covid.

“To achieve that vision, government must address several key issues. The key of those is funding,” he said.

“We need to develop a motivated, capable and compassionate workforce, working with medical schools, nursing colleagues and other health care institutions in this regard, so that those are at the frontline, who are treating our people, should demonstrate their compassion.

“They must demonstrate their care. The arrogance that sometimes seeps through that one sees should be something of the past.

“Our people must be taken care of with delicacy, with real love and compassion,” he said.

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He added that for this to happen, the government would need to invest more in training programmes for healthcare professionals and increase staffing levels to meet the population’s needs.

More funding, closer monitoring

He added said that more funding needed to be made available to the healthcare sector and that it needed to be closely monitored to ensure it was well spent and not mismanaged.

Speaking during the closing remarks of the event, the president said Presidential Health Compact with its nine pillars was signed at the previous Presidential Health Summit and it was this that would provide the roadmap for the Department of Health to address the issues which needed to be addressed in order to close the gap in the quality of health care received and eventually implement the National Health Insurance bill.