Deputy Chairperson, let me acknowledge the presence of my colleagues in the House, the Minister of Women, Children and People with Disabilities, Mme Xingwana, the Minister of Public Works, Mme Mahlangu- Nkabinde, and the Minister of Public Enterprises, Rre Gigaba. Welcome colleagues, and thank you very much.
The newly found phenomenon or slogan of "No condom, no thola [sex]" is not the policy of the Department of Health, but we welcome it today. [Laughter.] We, together with the MECs, will embrace it with both arms. Even though it has not been our policy, we will start propagating it very strongly, because we got it from this House.
Chairperson, thank you for this very powerful debate, which I think was very constructive. We agreed on lots of things, but I just want to highlight a few things, especially the issue of human resources, which was touched on by the hon Plaatjie and others. Unfortunately, he is absent, because he has left, but there are some things which have not been understood.
There is a general belief, especially among the elected members in this country, that the shortage of health care workers and doctors is a South African phenomenon. It is a global phenomenon; it is not just South African. In fact, there is a shortage of a total of four million health workers worldwide. If we want to have enough doctors, nurses and pharmacists, etc, the whole world must produce four million people. That is a big problem. Unfortunately, 80% of this shortage is in sub-Saharan Africa.
I am saying this because time and again we are told the following. The Nursing Council is very strict and it does not want people to come and work in this country. The Ministry is not making it possible for people to come and work here. The Health Professions Council must issue permits for people to come and work here. It is good to say this type of thing.
Because this phenomenon is global and not just South African, the World Health Organisation discusses it in the World Health Assembly every year. They have even passed certain regulations about what actually needs to be done. There is no Minister anywhere in the world who wants to lose health workers to another country; it doesn't happen. So, there are rules, and one of the resolutions passed is that we must try very hard not to recruit health workers from a developing country because that country will collapse.
Chairperson, I could open up the situation tomorrow for all the doctors and nurses from the African continent who want to work in South Africa. If I could do that, they would come in their thousands and I assure you of that because we have got thousands of applications. But the moment you did that, the patients would have to follow them. They couldn't stay in their countries on the other side of the Limpopo River when all the doctors had come to South Africa. So, you must understand this phenomenon, and we are trying to respect this. We are trying to respect those who are already in the country, but we can't actively recruit people. To show that this is a global phenomenon, when we debated this issue at the World Health Assembly, representatives from Canada said that if it had not been for South Africa, they would have been in trouble. That is because all their doctors were going to the United States. It means that the richer the country is, the more doctors it gets. Doctors from Canada were migrating to the United States, while Canada was making use of South Africa to fill up that space. Now you want us to make use of the whole African continent to fill our space - but they are still developing countries. Instead, we must have our own home-grown staff.
Firstly, we started by calling for the Nursing Summit in order to discuss the issue of the training of nurses in order to increase their numbers. Secondly, with regard to doctors, we started with mid-level workers. In that regard, I want to thank the Walter Sisulu University for being the first university in the country which has produced mid-level workers - there are 22 of them - and we are encouraging other universities to follow. These are workers who are trained for four years and will work somewhere between nurses and doctors to help in situations where there is a lack of doctors. We want other universities to start doing that.
In addition, we spoke to universities on this matter only two weeks ago. We started with Wits at the beginning of this year. We asked them to take 40 more medical students than they usually do. We gave them money to do that, R8 million. They took 40 more students than they usually do, and that R8 million is to help them to expand that programme. I have spoken to the deans of all the medical schools, and they said that we should give them eight weeks to report back to us, because we want all of them to implement this next year, so that we can have our own home-grown personnel. It doesn't help to believe that we can just allow other countries to train personnel and we will take them from them.
Lastly, one of the reasons why we are working with the Minister of Higher Education and Training is to effect the demerger of Limpopo University and Medunsa, because we want Medunsa to be a standalone university and train more and more doctors, and Limpopo to get a new medical school. This is so that we expand institutions rather than merge them and decrease, because we want to grow our own doctors.
With regard to medical male circumcision, many MECs have mentioned the hospitals where this is happening. At Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Gauteng they do 50 circumcisions a day, more than in any other part of the country and they originally invited me to launch that. I would just like to call on the MECs, colleagues, to let every hospital do at least a few circumcisions per day. Every hospital can do that. There is no hospital in the country which can fail to do that. I mean it is one of the biggest weapons in the fight against HIV and Aids.
In fact, in KwaZulu-Natal the MEC challenged general practitioners in this regard, and because I was addressing some of them last week, I also gave them a challenge: If every general practitioner, every person in private practice, every doctor, as a contribution to society, could do just one free circumcision a day, we would be getting somewhere. So, I am asking the MECs to challenge private practitioners in their own ... [Inaudible.] ... to do just one circumcision a day as a contribution to society. It would go a long way in helping us.
With regard to the Office of Standards Compliance, which you will very soon debate in this House, we have chosen six standards which every hospital must comply with: cleanliness, attitudes of staff, safety and security of patients, infection control, the long queues and drug stock-outs. These are the standards we want to enforce. [Applause.] The Bill to establish the Office of Standards Compliance will very soon come to this House. The Treasury has already given us R116 million in this current financial year to establish the office that will make sure that these standards are actually complied with. Thank you, Deputy Chairperson. [Applause.]
Debate concluded.