Treatment

 

South African Medical Association takes issue with Competition Commission findings

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The South African Medical Association (Sama) believes that the Competition Commission Health Market Inquiry (HMI) provisional report is faulty in its findings, particularly that doctors increase demand for unnecessary services.

In a statement, the association says that in light of the fact that the investigation took almost four years to complete and runs to hundreds of pages, it is, on first review, somewhat disappointed in the overall analysis of the private healthcare sector.

Doctor-induced moral hazard

Sama is particularly concerned about the allegations that doctors increase demand of unnecessary services, including increased admissions to hospitals, says chairperson, Dr Mzukisi Grootboom.

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‘Private healthcare not affordable, even for people who are supposedly rich’

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The findings of the Competition Commission’s Health Market Inquiry released today reveal what Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi says he already knew – that private healthcare has become so exorbitantly expensive, even those on medical aid can’t afford it.

Moreover, the commission found – during its more than four-year-long investigation – that the market was characterised by high and rising costs of healthcare and medical scheme cover, disempowered and uninformed consumers, and a general absence of value-based purchasing.

“That private healthcare has become costlier and costlier has been proven today, some of us knew it long ago back in 2009 that private healthcare no longer affordable, even for people who are supposedly rich who are on medical aid can’t afford it,” Motsoaledi said at the briefing held in Sandton to announce the release of the much anticipated provisional report.

According to the inquiry’s chairperson, former Chief Justice, Sa
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You are paying more for less when it comes to medical aid, does it make sense. Here’s why.

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What are your chances of ending up in a hospital? Higher than you’d think if you are a medical aid member in a large city — and the reason reveals some never-before-seen truths about the country’s private healthcare sector.

A lack of competition within the private healthcare market is fuelling an epidemic of overtreatment — and mystery medical bills — in South Africa, the Competition Commission revealed on Thursday.

As part of a four-year investigation into private healthcare costs, the Competition Commission looked at hospital admission rates among patients treated in nine specialised areas of medicine. People who had insurance and lived near more hospitals were more likely to be admitted than people with similar conditions that lived farther away from lots of empty beds, the statutory body found.

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Travelling abroad – Consider this advice before you leave

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I will never forget the first Canadian medical tourist I interviewed. I was gripped when this person told me about travelling abroad for invasive surgery, accompanied by their spouse. While in India, this spouse required emergency surgery to address a chronic condition that had worsened.

This situation sounded so distressing and the researcher in me wondered: Could the mental and physical stress of caregiving in an unfamiliar, international context have negatively impacted the spouse’s health to the point that surgery was required?

There are many reasons why patients opt to seek health care abroad. In some cases, it is because they cannot access timely surgery locally. In others, they are seeking an experimental procedure that is not available at home, such as an unapproved stem cell therapy.

For most of the last decade I have been involved in extensively studying medical tourism. I have spoken with patients, policy-makers, doctors, nurses, tourism official
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Technology – Egyptian e-health startup ElBalto launches mobile consultation service

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Egyptian startup ElBalto has launched a mobile application that provides users with easy, reliable, timely and affordable online video consultations via a network of customer-rated and licensed doctors.

Video consultations offered on ElBalto will initially be available in the specialisations of Psychiatry, Pediatrics, Nutrition and Gynecology, while the startup will also offer home visits in areas like Orthopedics and Cardiology.

“Currently, Egypt is suffering from a significant imbalance in the health workforce distribution, with doctors concentrated in the big cities and urban settings,” said co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Mahmoud Abdalla.

“I was personally inspired when I became a father and had to go with my wife and newborn every other week for a doctor’s appointment to get answers to very basic questions, or to follow up on treatment. We were both struggling with time, effort, cost and logistics, let alone the inconvenience if we wo
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480 narkotiseurs kan SA verlaat oor swak NGV

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Indien narkotiseurs meen dat die Nasionale Gesondheidsversekering (NGV) en die beoogde prysbeheer ’n bedreiging vir hul beroep inhou, kan tot sowat 480 of ’n derde van hulle die land verlaat.

Natalie Zimmelman, uitvoerende hoof van die Suid-Afrikaanse Vereniging van Narkotiseurs (Sasa), het Dinsdag op ’n mediakonferensie die uitslae van ’n peiling onder narkotiseurs oor onder meer die NGV bekend gemaak.

Sy sê narkotiseurs is ’n “hoogs sensitiewe en baie mobiele” arbeidsmag omdat meer as 40% van hulle ook in ander lande geregistreer is. Meer as 50% het reeds in ’n ander land gewerk.

“Hulle kan môre die land verlaat as hulle wil.”

’n Peiling wat verlede jaar vir die markondersoek oor private gesondheidsorg uitgevoer is se inligting is nou vrygestel.

Dit toon 35% of sowat 480 narkotiseurs oorweeg dit om in die komende vyf jaar die land te verlaat. Dit hou met sosio-ekonomiese bedreigings vir hul beroep en hul siening oor die gesondhe
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What the National Health Insurance means for you & your pocket

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Two Bills, almost 200 pages may change healthcare forever in SA. Haven’t read them? We did the heavy lifting so you don’t have to.

Love it or hate it: The country continues to move forward with introducing its universal healthcare scheme the National Health Insurance (NHI). – see photo below video

Last week, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi introduced the draft Medical Schemes Amendment Bill and NHI Bill in Pretoria. The new legislation proposes significant changes to the way healthcare is funded and managed that could have far-reaching effects on you, your family and your pocket book.

Take a look at some of the proposals that have the minister already gearing up to go to court. Then watch to hear how the minister plans to make the most of your unspent premiums as the Council for Medical Schemes plans to lower the mandatory amount schemes hold in reserve to free up more cash for health.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2gwAu3scp0&feature=youtu.be
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Hospital operate without Lights,Toilet Papers,Panado, and Pain Killers

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Hellen Franz Hospital at Blouberg Municipality ka Limpopo must be placed under Administration,how can a Hospital operate without Lights,Toilet Papers,Panado, and Pain Killers..?

We can not allow ANC’s Phophi Ramathuba and her incompetent Managers to continue with killing of our people,this Hospital is now a Mortuary coz even if you go there with scratched finger,you won’t last for two days,you’ll die like a sick Mosquito,many people died here due to negligent of incompetent staff..!!

This ANC Government with it’s Phophi are taking our people for a ride,she must resign together with Onica Moloi on Friday, otherwise she has to be charged for #genocide ,how can a hospital operate with candles..,in this winter,how can you allow patients to bath with Cold Water..?

Actually,where is DA and other opposition parties in this regard,,are they visiting these kinds of hospitals or just waiting for the 2019 Votes;who shall vote coz many lives shall be lost by then..?

Mr
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Doctor pleads for heaters for babies, gets departmental threats

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A Limpopo hospital is in such a state of disrepair that a doctor has taken to begging for donations to improve conditions for patients.

This act of caring, however, has led to the department coming down on him with threats of disciplinary action.

Patients at the WF Knobel Hospital in Ga-Matlala outside Polokwane have to brave icy winter nights sleeping in wards with broken windows, leading doctor LE Rambuwane to write a letter urging people to help him raise R15 000 to buy and install 50 heaters in the paediatric wards.

“It is with great sadness and embarrassment having to write this letter to you,” his letter starts.

“I serve in a public hospital, which lacks many things, and with very little support from the powers that be…” it continues, before his plea for the public to donate.

He hoped to raise R15 000, which would be used to buy heaters to be mounted in the paediatric wards. At the moment, he said, the patients were waiting with bated bre
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Nuwe gesondheidsorg in die vooruitsig

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Die afskaffing van bybetalings op mediese dienste is een van die aanbevelings van die voorgestelde wet op mediese dienste.

Volgens Aaron Motsoaelidi, minister van gesondheid, kan slegs 10% van die bevolking private gesondheidsorg bekostig en moet dit onmiddelik reggestel word.

Tussengangers gaan ook afgeskaf word om te verseker dat lede direk gelde aan die mediese fondse betaal. Die rykes moet nou die armes subsidieer en die jonger geslag moet die ouer geslag help en die gesonde mense moet die siek mense subsidieer. Hy sluit af deur te sê dat die oorskakeling ‘n massiewe reorganisasie van die totale gesondheidsorg stelsel  gaan wees, beide privaat en openbaar.

Medici sê mense sterf daagliks in staatshospitale, diefstal van mediese voorraad en toerusting is aan die orde van die dag.  Instandhouding van toerusting bestaan nie en personeel se betalings is agterstallig.  Die totale gesondheidsorg van die staat is in chaos en al uitweg is dat privaat mediese
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Green Tea extract:- SA voted among best in the world

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A highly potent South African green tea extract has been voted among the world’s top new products at one of Europe’s most prestigious natural health trade shows.

Produced in the foothills of the Drakensberg in Mpumalanga and developed by scientists and medical experts, polyphenol-rich Origine 8 was voted as one of the top three out of 330 new health products in the Judges Choice Awards at the Natural & Organic Products Europe trade show (NOPE) in London…
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Drug Users:- How to reverse overdoses

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Find out how drug users banded together to use a simple injection to save thousands of lives. Alexander Walley was a twentysomething medical student when he witnessed the power of naloxone. It was the midnight shift at the Emergency Department at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.

The call wasn’t unusual: a middle-aged man had been found unconscious after overdosing on heroin. Walley accompanied a pair of paramedics to an ambulance, and they headed out into the cool moonlit night. After five blocks or so they arrived at one of the city’s housing projects and threaded their way across crumbling sidewalks to a shabby apartment in a dimly lit building. Inside, Walley found the man slumped against a wall, blue-skinned and not breathing. “He looked dead,” Walley says, recalling the incident 15 years later.

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Groote Schuur Hospital and UCT break ground on neuroscience centre

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Work has begun on a state-of-the-art Neuroscience Centre at Groote Schuur Hospital (GSH), which will be the hub for neuro-clinical disciplines at the hospital and University of Cape Town’s neuroscience research programme.

The centre will be home to the newly-established UCT Neuroscience Institute together with the GSH Clinical Neuroscience Centre, where researchers and clinicians will work together to treat the brain and nervous system disorders that burden the South African population.

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“UCT has invested in new interdisciplinary research institutes to address important problems facing our society,” says Dr Max Price, vice-chancellor of UCT. “The Neuroscience Institute is one of these
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Malaria still kills so many due to fake drugs

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Malaria, a mosquito-borne parasitic infection that affects about 3.2 billion people in 95 countries, has become largely a disease of the young and poor.

Due to effective medications like chloroquine and artemisinins, malaria deaths dropped an estimated 60 percent worldwide between 2000 and 2015. The Americas and Africa saw the greatest improvements.

Still, 216 million new cases of malaria were reported in 2016, the latest data available. Most of them occurred in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Ivory Coast and Mozambique. And of the 445,000 people who died from the infection, about 70 percent were children under the age of 5.

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If malaria is a curable disease with ef
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Public comment open soon for The National Health Insurance Bill of 2018

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The National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill of 2018 will be published in the Government Gazette shortly for public comment.

A key provision of the bill will be the establishment of an NHI fund to pay for health services so that all South Africans have access to quality care.

“The bill seeks to establish the NHI Fund of South Africa, as a public entity, so as to provide for a sustained universal health access that is affordable and of high quality. It also sets out its functions, powers and duties,” Cabinet said in a statement following its regular fortnightly meeting.

The bill provides a framework for the active purchasing of health care services by the fund on behalf of users and creates mechanisms for the equitable, effective and efficient use of the resources of the fund to meet the health needs of users.

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