Unions in Limpopo have threatened to go on strike this week following a dispute between healthcare workers and the provincial department of health. Thousands of healthcare workers have accused the department of unilaterally changing their work roster system, claiming the move will increase their workload amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
In January nurses union Denosa said the decision by the department to change the roster would put pressure on nurses who were already overstretched and overwhelmed by the demands of the job.
Some healthcare workers have further stated that the department limit on overtime will deprive them of compensation that has effectively become part of their monthly income.
Yesterday it emerged that the changes made by the department were compelled by the unsustainability of its current operations. According to the department, no less than R15.7bn, which is 70% of its R22.6bn budget, is spent on staff compensation. This is more than the norm of 60% of the budget expenditure on salaries. It leaves just 30% of the budget for actual health services, at times leaving some facilities running short of essential items.
It is also concerning to note that despite this expenditure on staff, the department still has “gross shortages and high vacancy rates” in areas it says are critical for healthcare delivery. It is unable to fill these positions because of its already high salary bill.
Perhaps most important is how the department got to this point.
Based on its own assessments, the department found that the overtime claimed was either because of poor planning or the deliberate manipulation of rosters to create a false shortage of staff in some areas.
“We discovered that rosters were, in some cases, deliberately designed to generate overtime unnecessarily. Where employees could be rostered in accordance with workload, this was not done,” it said in a statement.
What is clear is that the current expenditure is unsustainable and compromises the ability to deliver proper healthcare. We therefore implore the department to make the necessary interventions to ensure that public money is spent to deliver efficient healthcare and not milked through operational inefficiencies that benefit those in the system.
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