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The DA welcomes the announcement by the Cabinet that the National Health Amendment Bill, to create an Office of Health Standards Compliance, is to be released for comment soon.

However, much depends on the teeth that the Office is given in terms of both budget and enforcement tools. We look forward to seeing the draft legislation.

A properly functional standards enforcement office is essential to improve public health service. In fact, the DA believes that the proposed NHI is nothing but a distraction from the most critical and most basic challenge of entrenching high standards of health care. At the moment, the Department of Health has no idea of the quality of services that public hospitals are offering. It responds on a purely ad hoc basis to crises, but it has no way of preventing these crises from happening in the first place by knowing where the problems are.

While it holds private hospitals to exacting quality standards, it has until now not done the same with its own hospitals. The consequence has been that some hospital managers have been able to get away with, quite literally, manslaughter, because they have never been held accountable for the avoidable deaths under their watch, as a result of poor hygiene, overworked staff, and equipment shortages or failures.

The National Health Act, which provides for this Office, was passed in 2003, and this amendment has been a long time in coming. Had the Office been established earlier, many lives would have been saved.

We hope that the creation of this Office will result in a tightening up of employment requirements for hospital CEOs, for closer review of tenders for hospital equipment, for higher standards of cleanliness and for closer attention to the conditions of work of health professionals.