Annual Report 2007/08 read about the FOM Scholarship Scheme's activities over the past year. The Annual Report includes colourful pictures, charts and tables as well as lots of important information.
The Human Resource crises in Rural & Public health sector
The FOM Scholarship Scheme has produced 43 graduates and is supporting 65 students this year as a way of addressing the health skills shortage in rural hospitals. However, one may ask how bad is the situation in terms of health professionals at rural hospitals ?
If one considers Doctors, one will find that the majority of Doctors are employed or working within the private health care sector treating patients who have health care cover (medical aid or medical insurance)- who are a minority compared to the total population. Approximately 30 % of Doctors in South Africa are in the public sector who are responsible for treating the majority of the South African population. A similar situation as described for Doctors exists for most of the health care disciplines.
If we focus on one of the 5 hospitals we work with — Mosvold hospital — we can get a better sense of their human resource needs versus actual staff. From the bar chart below it is obvious to see that they face serious challenges regarding the numbers of professional health care workers.
In terms of Doctors, for example, the hospital needs at least 12 Doctors to provide a good service, whilst in May 2008 there were only 6 Doctors (a number of foreign Doctors have since arrived). The implications of this are significant and includes a never ending work load, causing them to eventually suffer from burnout or ultimately causing them to leave because of the heavy workload — which contributes to the initial problem. Again this situation applies equally to the other healthcare disciplines such as nursing, pharmacy, radiography etc. In addition under such conditions, career development including post graduate studies are impossible.
The ultimate outcome of a lack of professional staff in public hospitals is inadequate service provision to those in need of health care. In some rural hospitals, services like physiotherapy are considered a “luxury” — whilst many people would attest to the benefits of physiotherapy in post operative recuperation. When one of our first physiotherapy graduates, Dumisani Gumede, went to work at Hlabisa hospital near Empangeni in 2005, there was no therapy department at all !!
Can the FOM Scholarship Scheme make a difference ?
The FOM Scholarship Scheme has already made an impact in that 43 health care professionals have been trained and these graduates are working in the rural health sector. Every graduate that returns to work at one of the rural hospitals, provides valuable skills and services and relieves the work load of existing staff to some extent thus hopefully preventing skilled and experienced staff leaving because they are over worked. In addition, our graduates are more likely to stay longer at rural hospitals than those not from the area, because they are connected to the community and see and feel the impact they are making in serving their community.
The FOM Scholarship Scheme also recognizes the importance of giving rural health care workers good career development opportunities and has supported a number of graduates to undertake post graduate distance education. This is seen as a critical retention strategy.
What does the future hold ?
As mentioned above, we are supporting 65 students this year in a wide range of health science disciplines as can be seen in the chart below.
It is exciting to see that more and more students each year are able to qualify for assistance in that they have been accepted to study a health science degree. Also, it is interesting to see that the majority of our students (19) are studying medicine — and more than 50% of them have progressed past 3 year — ie. they are succeeding. A few years ago no one in Ingwavuma thought it was possible to go to University let alone study medicine !
As graduates are produced each year the FOM Scholarship Scheme is making a significant impact in reducing the high vacancy rates of health professionals at the hospitals in the Umkhanyakude district.
