Reply to DA question reveals extensive inspection-backlogs and high vacancy rates in Directorate for Radiation Control
Backlog of inspections places health and safety of South Africans at risk
DA writes to Minister of Health requesting urgent action to resolve problems





The Democratic Alliance (DA) will be writing to the Minister of Health, Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, requesting that he urgently attend to the serious backlogs in the inspection of his Departments 15 619 x-ray units across the country. This comes after a parliamentary reply to a DA question revealed that the Department of Health's Directorate for Radiation Control, which regulates the possession, use, transport, import, export and disposal of radioactive materials and x-ray machines that are used for a variety of medical, scientific, agricultural, industrial and commercial purposes; not only has chronic vacancy rates but also has serious backlogs in the number of inspections needing to be conducted.

The reply revealed that the Directorate's posts for inspectors across the three regional offices situated in Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town have a 40% vacancy rate. In many instances, the vacancy rates are chronic, as with the posts in the Pretoria office, which existed for nearly two years. Similarly in Durban, the two posts allocated for this region are both vacant, with one having been so for over three years. This effectively means that the Durban regional office, which is responsible for Kwazulu-Natal, the Free State, and part of the Eastern Cape, has no inspectors, and service delivery is effectively frozen.

The DA believes that the Department's inability to address these chronic vacancy rates is the leading contributor to the backlogs in the number of inspections that are meant to be carried out by the Directorate. Across the three regional offices, the combined total of backlogs is a daunting 10 378 for inspections conducted yearly and inspections conducted every three years.

When the figure is broken down according to regions, it shows that the Pretoria office has the worst backlog of inspections due every 3 years, with nearly 5000 inspections outstanding. Given that this office oversees a region covering the Gauteng, Mpumalanga, North West and Limpopo provinces, their backlogs place many people's health and safety at risk. The DA believes this has serious implications for all those South Africans who rely on the x-ray equipment of state hospitals.

The Minister should make attending to this problem a priority. We can ill afford to have an extensive health system in place where the technical components that comprise that system are potentially unsafe or indeed, do not function at all.