Speech delivered by MEC for Health and Welfare Mr. Seaparo Sekoati on the occasion of Nursed' Diploma Awards Ceremony Jack Botes Hall – Polokwane

10 September 2004

Programme director
Chairperson of council
Chancellor and Vice Chancellor
Deputy Vice Principal
Graduates
All Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen:

Yesterday in Cape Town we witnessed the passing, by Parliament, of the Traditional Healers Bill that recognise the role that indigenous knowledge has been and continues to play in providing health care to our people. This constitutes a major breakthrough in ensuring that all the major stakeholders are mobilised in a people’s contract to provide quality health care to our people.

Our department continues to be faced with a huge skills deficit particularly in the rural areas. This is becoming clearer as we succeed in our endeavour to ensure that our clinics in particular provide 24-hour services to our people. So the ceremony of today is both relevant and long overdue.

It is therefore an honour for me to join you the Executive Management, the staff and the students of the Limpopo College of Nursing at this special occasion to celebrate the achievements of our future leaders.

The students, who are receiving the certificates here today have been thoroughly tested and found worthy of holding an official qualification from this reputable college.

These diplomas that we are giving today are a prize possession and we therefore congratulate you on reaching this very important milestone in your career.

We thank our academic professionals who remain committed to the noble profession of educating our future leaders. Your toil can only be described as a life-giving heartbeat.

Without you producing sufficient health professionals like the ones graduating today, our health system is bound to collapse.

We appreciate your endeavour to seek excellence in education and dedication to teaching.

After all, the pursuit of academic excellence is the business of this College.

We are confident that because of and through you our graduates are equipped with the intellectual and practical means to shine out among the many, with the urge to venture into the public service with confidence because of their combined theoretical and practical engagement. After all one of the principles of our National Qualifications Authority is the integration of theory and practice.

The challenge of meeting the basic needs of our people and their health needs in particular requires that we be relevant and responsive in the education that we impart and receive. This college is therefore called upon to continue to develop and refine its curriculum in order to meet this objective.

As we share in this joyous occasion, we must be reminded that these valuable certificates only represent the beginning of your respective journeys towards contributing your efforts to your communities and the country at large.

We are confident that you will never cease to seek more knowledge, never tire of overcoming obstacles and never compromise on maintaining a professional work ethic. These are all necessary for your collective and individual success.

The department is currently busy with the district service excellence awards, which will culminate into the Provincial Service Excellence Awards.

Since their inception these Awards have continued to celebrate and promote excellence in the department.

Through these awards we recognise and honour talented, dedicated, innovative, inspiring and effective members of our department. We also use this occasion to bring back to track those of us who are still lagging behind, because we need each other in order to realise the objective of quality health care for all.

Our expectation and wish is that next time we present these excellence awards, you will be among the recipients, driven by the passion to provide quality health care to our people.

It must be borne in mind that our people do not judge their health care on the basis of technical quality of the clinical care that they receive, but on the criteria of convenience, promptness, friendliness, flexibility of staff and attention to detail.

We believe that as you get gradually integrated into the public service you will contribute to our efforts of making our health system fair, efficient and responsive unlike the rigid and inefficient system that we inherited from the past regime.

This is not to suggest that there has not been progress in the transformation of our health system in the past ten years. Indeed we have made great strides and we are proud of them. As we start the second decade of our democracy we are prepared to continue with the unfinished business, and work has already started earnestly in this regard.

Last month in August, Parliament passed the National Health Act, replacing the last vestiges of apartheid in health policy.

This Act provides a framework for a structured and uniform health system, capable of bringing together the various elements of the national health system with the ultimate goal of realizing the objective of providing universal access to quality health care for all.

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While some of the aspects of the Act are immediately operational, others are not and regulations to operationalise them will be published for comment. We therefore encourage our communities to make use of the platforms created to make meaningful input into various pieces of legislation. We do this because we are committed to people- driven and people – centred development.

This Act among others requires that we ensure adequate distribution of health personnel, particularly in the rural areas. We are all aware of the acute shortage of health personnel particularly nurses and doctors in the rural areas to deliver health care to our people. Part of this shortage has been due to the inequities of the past and the deliberate social engineering, which kept many of our inquiring young people from these fields of study. Yet the other reason for this has been the unprecedented migration of our personnel to western countries particularly the UK to seek greener pastures. Government appreciates the need by our health professionals to seek new knowledge and broaden their experience abroad. In fact we have been providing bursaries and other study incentives to our people to study overseas so they can come and work for our country and province. But we do not accept the brain-drain as we experienced in the larger part of the past ten years.

In order to curb this skills migration and at the same time provide an opportunity for people to gain international exposure we have passed this Act at the same time when our country has just singed a memorandum of understanding with the United Kingdom on the Code of Practice on the Ethical Recruitment of Health Workers.

The signing of the Memorandum of Understanding came as a result of a recognition by the two countries of the effects of international migration of health professionals on many developing countries, particularly in our Continent. This agreement serves as a good example of how the issue of international migration of professionals can be managed.

As we said earlier, the agreement deals with the issue of retention of our health personnel but also provide for the creation of education and practice opportunities, allowing our professionals to work for a particular period in health institutions internationally. It also allows for the UK health professionals to work in our country as evidenced by the presence of such professionals in many parts of our country.

We welcome this initiative and believe that it will complement the initiatives of the National Health Act to retain and ensure adequate skilling our professionals. The challenge that we face is to sign functional Memorandums of Understanding with other Western countries to stem the tide of migration of professionals to these countries, which in any case are best placed to train their own professionals. Developing countries surely deserve to retain their own professionals, in whom they have invested a lot, to contribute to their development.

Of most importance in the area of skills development is the establishment of academic health complexes consisting of health and academic institutions working together to educate and train health care personnel. This arrangement fits squarely with the twinning programme between some of our health institutions in the country and academic institutions in the UK.

In our own province we have built this relationship as evidenced by the one we have between our tertiary complex and the University of the North and MEDUNSA. We thank these universities for ensuring quality and maintaining standards in our college and tertiary complex. We hope that during this new dispensation in the provision of health care to our people this relationship will grow.

Through this measure we hope that our professionals will have adequate skills, acquired both locally and internationally, and help alleviate the skills poverty that we are experiencing.

In congratulating you for the work well done we remind you that nothing comes on a silver plate. No matter how hectic your working life becomes, always make time to study.

You are entering a competitive world where your knowledge, dedication and work ethic must be of the highest standard. Opportunities for innovation and advancement are there. It is our hope that you will make use of them to bridge the skills gap that we face.

As you might be aware, you will be placed in the deep rural areas of our province. The conditions there might not be the same as the ones you lived under while at college or even at your respective homes. Our view if that the nursing profession is a call and as such we urge you to heed that call no matter where you have been deployed. We will do everything possible to make your stay in those areas as comfortable as possible.

Good luck and thank you.

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