Chairperson, the question from the hon Ntwanambi is about the estimated number of nurses required to ensure that public hospitals and clinics fill existing nursing vacancies to provide adequate health care.
Hon member, this is the million dollar question! And it is a very important question for our country. However, before coming to figures, let me make a general statement that you are aware of, and maybe that statement will answer part (2) of your question, that is whether there are any plans in place. Unfortunately I need to start with that one.
The situation in nursing in regard to training, ethos, numbers and everything that we used to know is actually disturbing. We thought that instead of just sitting in the office and solving it, we should call a massive nursing summit. You might remember that I called it a Codesa of nursing. I deliberately used that term to remind South Africans that when things were bad in this country we convened a Codesa to give birth to a new country. So, we wanted to give birth to a new nursing profession in this country.
There are people who believe that things got worse in nursing because of the practices of the ruling party after the 1994 elections. The profession of nursing started getting damaged in 1986. I know because I was a doctor in a rural hospital and I stood against some of the plans, but we had no power. That is when the problems started. In the past a person would pass matric, get into the nearest hospital and start training as a nurse, and at the end of that month he or she would start earning a salary.
I must declare here that as a youngster who used to wear only shorts, "kortbroeke", my first pair of long trousers was bought by my cousin who had just started training as a nurse. I can't forget them, those first long trousers that I wore in the world, because they were part of bringing an end to poverty.
That method was abandoned and they started saying that nurses had to train at a university. Whenever I say this, people believe that I am undermining nursing and I don't want them to train at university level. We want them to go there, but that is not the primary platform for training. We believe that nursing is a bedside experience, where you go in and on the very first day you start acquiring skills. And nurses who were trained by that method are still in demand, not only in South Africa but all over the world.
So, since 1986 things have got mixed up and the result is that there are many nursing platforms. Some go directly to university, others go to a few colleges that are left in the hospitals, and others go to nursing colleges away from hospitals. That also complicated the occupation-specific dispensation, OSD, because one cannot even classify them.
So, the aim of that summit was to deal with those issues and I am very happy that we made a lot of progress. Members might have heard about some of the announcements regarding the resolutions. They were to increase the number and the quality, and to go back to what nursing was before 1986.
The situation became so bad that one of the nursing unions even took the North West government to court because there was an argument about defining what a nursing student was. They wanted a judge to give a definition of a nursing student. I said this was a policy issue. Why was there an argument as to whether a nursing student was a student or a worker? It was because some gave them bursaries and others gave them stipends, and it depended on the province in which one was. So, the whole issue of nursing training even depended on the corner of the country in which you found yourself. That is why we had the summit, and I must report that the summit solved most of these problems. We need to start from the beginning.
Having said that, let me start mentioning numbers. Because of what I have just described, the vacancies differ from province to province. It will take time to mention numbers and I will give only the vacancies. Unfortunately, the worst situation is in the Eastern Cape - according to many health indicators, as you will know - and it will always be the Eastern Cape. They have only filled 39,9% of the vacancies, and that means the fill rate by September 2010 was only 39,8%. The Free State is better. They have filled 88,6% - not bad at all. In Gauteng they have filled 85% - not bad at all. KwaZulu-Natal has filled 70,8%.
Another province that was very low and had filled only 48,2% was Limpopo, but MEC Magadzi, who came in just recently, picked up the problem and by February this year, after she had picked it up, immediately increased the number of nurses by 3 795. So, she is solving the problem, immediately after having discovered that there was such a problem.
Another province that has a problem is Mpumalanga. It has filled only 41,3%. By the way, we also hire nurses in the national department. They do not work in the hospitals, but in the national department itself, and we have filled 73,7%. In the North West they have filled 88,4%. In the Northern Cape they have filled 70,7% and in the Western Cape they have filled 71,4%. The problems were in those three provinces and one of them is being solved. I will give attention to the other two.
Having spoken about the nursing summit, let me say we also had an audit, which has been finalised. We have got all the nursing colleges, their infrastructure, the equipment, and the number of tutors, and it is complete. So, we know which ones need to be renovated and what equipment they need in terms of infrastructure.