View Document - Parliament of South Africa

79 TUESDAY, 7 OCTOBER 2008
80
7. Curb the staff exodus
Northern Cape
(1) Yes
(i) Six
(ii) All the waiting lists are for planned
and elective surgeries only. All the
urgent and life threatening operations
are performed immediately and
efficiently.
— Orthopaedics (joint replacement
surgeries)
— Opthalmology (cataract surgery)
— ENT
— Urology
— Elective surgery
— Elective neuro-surgery
(iii) The waiting lists are monitored on a
weekly basis at the hospital level and
submitted to the provincial department
on a monthly basis.
(2) The average waiting time for elective
procedures is between one-three
months. The patients are continuously
followed-up during the wait time and if
the clinical condition of the patients
changes their surgeries are performed
on the basis of emergency.
Western Cape
(1) The Western Cape Provincial Department
of Health currently does not
monitor waiting lists.
(a) This is an issue that has been
identified as requiring attention.
Much of the discussions in the
province regarding a single waiting
list have for the first time been
around equity to access of surgical
procedures and exposed the often
very different waiting times at
different institutions. There are
really two issues of concern here:
emergency cases and elective
cases. Each institution has its own
method of booking these cases,
and there is currently no way to
track this.
(b) We are currently engaged in a
process to improve our information
on our theatre activity, which
is currently inadequate. The plans
are to create a unified theatre data
system and to capture the date that
each procedure was first booked as
a data point when each surgical
case is done. Once we have this
system in place we foresee that we
would be able to say what the
waiting times are for each type of
surgical procedure, and be able to
provide this by each individual
institution. Currently we are exploring
how to gather the data.
This would allow for a detailed
analysis of theatre activity and
allow comparisons between institutions
and also give the ability to
assess what level of care is being
delivered at each site of surgical
activity.
(i) With regards to the number of
lists, each institution has different
numbers of lists. As a
(2)
generalisation, all surgical disciplines
have seen a tremendous
decrease in the available lists,
due to many factors, but mainly
due to the availability of trained
theatre staff.
(ii) Emergency and elective surgery.
In the Western Cape, access to emergency
or urgent theatre is significantly
reduced by several factors which includes
lack of post-operative bed capacity,
lack of theatre availability and/
or lack of theatre resources, namely
staff and equipment. Emergency cases
wait from one hour to four days for
theatre time in the Western Cape. Each