The content on this page is not written by Polity.org.za, but is supplied by third parties. This content does not constitute news reporting by Polity.org.za.

The Department of Health is ignoring three oversight bodies - Scopa (Select Committee on Public Accounts), the Auditor-General (AG) and the Public Protector -in its continuing lack of action over management problems at the Compensation Commission for Occupational Diseases (CCOD). As a result mineworkers are waiting years to obtain payouts for illnesses they have acquired at work, and some are dying before they can get treatment approved.

This continuing neglect was highlighted in a Scopa hearing yesterday.

This situation should be deeply embarrassing to a government which claims to make quality health care its priority. The DA will be writing to health minister Aaron Motsoaledi to ask whether he will be acting on the problem that his predecessors ignored. We have also asked parliamentary questions, and we will be asking the Commission to come before the portfolio committee on health.

Miners who become sick with lung disease as a result of their jobs are entitled to compensation from the CCOD, which is a trading entity under the Department of Health. But the Commission is virtually non-functional.

A Scopa hearing five years ago found that management at the Commission was so poor that it did not even know how many mines were required to be making payments to it.

A succession of qualified AG reports since then have shown that the CCOD also did not know how many applications for compensation it had received, it did not know how many payments to ill miners it had made, and it did not even know whether it was actually solvent or not - because no actuarial evaluation had been performed since 2004.

To add to this, the Public Protector investigated the Medical Bureau for Occupational Diseases (which approves applicants' claims before the CCOD makes payments) in 2008 following a complaint by a doctor on behalf of 40 patients who had been waiting for more than two years for the Bureau to approve their claims. Some miners died waiting, and some were forced due to lack of finance to continue working despite their illnesses.

The Public Protector found that the Board was acting in contravention of the Constitution, and it made various recommendations that the Scopa hearing yesterday made clear had not been implemented.

It must be noted that the problems affecting the CCOD are not about money - it recorded a surplus of R177 million last year - but about management failure.