Speaker, hon President, hon Deputy President, fellow Ministers and Deputy Ministers, hon members of the House, ladies and gentlemen, let me join all right-thinking South Africans in thanking the President for his foresight in coupling the state of the nation address with the celebrations of the 20 years of freedom of Nelson Mandela, and the freedom of the whole country and the world at large.
The issue of the quality of health care services, specifically in the public sector, is ever in the minds and on the lips of our people. It appears quite frequently in our newspapers, just as it did this past weekend. It is also echoed in the electronic media time and again.
We, as the ruling party, great as we are, are the first to publicly acknowledge and speak about it openly, because prior to the election last year, when we were preparing to govern, we were able to acknowledge this issue and we identified it and that's why we put it in our ten-point programme.
Let me remind you of what the President said during the state of the nation address last year:
Fellow South Africans, we are seriously concerned about the deterioration of the quality of healthcare aggravated by the steady increase in the burden of disease in the past decade and a half.
Since then we have been dealing with this matter within the department. I have personally addressed a series of meetings involving people in the health sector. In those meetings this issue was thoroughly discussed.
I've addressed the doctors' and nurses' unions as well as other unions within the health sector. I've addressed the CEOs of our hospitals, including their clinical and nursing managers. I told them that as far as the ten-point programme is concerned, the issue of the quality of healthcare talks to them directly, more than to anybody else.
In those discussions we specifically dealt with issues such as the cleanliness of our health facilities, safety and security of patients, the attitude of staff towards patients, the long queues that our people are forced to endure, availability of medicines, maintenance of infrastructure and infection control. I advised CEOs that they are going to be judged and evaluated on, amongst other things, these basic tenets of quality of care.
Many opponents of National Health Insurance, NHI, opportunistically cite these problems of poor quality as a reason why NHI will not work and why it should not see the light of day. I have personally reassured them time and again that NHI is never going to be implemented in isolation away from the other points in the ten-point programme.
The quality of the provision of health care services is definitely going to be one of the criteria used before a health institution is accredited for the purposes of NHI.
This is not going to be just a wish from the department. One of the pieces of legislation that are going to be put before Parliament this year relates to the establishment of the office of standards compliance, to insist on agreed acceptable standards of quality of health care in each and every health institution, whether public or private.
As a precursor to this office, a unit has already been formed within the Department of Health and is working on the details of such standards. However, we are not going to wait for the establishment of such an office before we demand quality care in our institutions.
The assessment tool on how to audit compliance with standards will be tested in all provinces, starting from 8 to 12 March this year. Thereafter, all hospital and district managers will receive information on what is expected of them in order to meet the standards. Failure to meet these standards is not going to be without consequences.
In my budget speech last year, I elaborated on 11 different factors that contribute to the deteriorating quality of health care. Among these factors was the inability of individuals to take responsibility for their commissions or omissions within the health care sector.
The office of standard compliance is going to be a legal way to impose such responsibilities on any individual managing our health care. Hence one of our most important activities this year is going to be the assessment of capacity and functionality of management in each and every health institution.
On 1 December last year, the President outlined our new battle plan against the pandemic of HIV, Aids and TB. Let us remember that our icon, uBaba uNelson Mandela, was also a victim of TB. [Interjections.]