South Africa’s rollout of lenacapavir, a six-monthly HIV prevention injection, requires nurses to learn, adapt and find ways to make it work for patients. Christina Pitt unpacks how.
South Africa has a healthcare worker crisis. Those in power need to face it and think bigger about how to address it, argues Spotlight editor Marcus Low.
As South Africa is piecing together a new policy document on palliative care services for people with life-limiting and life-threatening illness, Motlalentoa Motsoane argues that making people’s lives better will depend on details like accurate costing, sufficient funding, and effective referral systems.
They are qualified, ready, and willing to serve their communities. But scores of these doctors in KwaZulu-Natal, are becoming increasingly desperate because of a lack of posts in government hospitals and clinics. Sue Segar reports.
The road to cancer treatment in South Africa often involves many encounters with healthcare workers and long journeys far from home. From pink iPhone covers to pink embroidery yarn, and cornstarch, Biénne Huisman hears the stories of people from vast corners of inland South Africa, and beyond, who travelled to Bloemfontein for specialist medical attention to treat their cancer. This is part 4 of Daily Maverick and Spotlight’s special series on cancer in South Africa.
In South Africa, tuberculosis is mainly diagnosed and treated in the public healthcare system. On paper, the private sector should also be able to deal with it, but in reality, TB care in this sector is often fragmented and confusing. Elri Voigt asks local experts why things work like this and what can be done about it.
South Africa’s HIV programme is under profound pressure. The answer should not be to make people living with HIV work harder to stay on treatment, but to remove unnecessary visits and use scarce clinical capacity where it is needed most, argue Dr Anna Grimsrud and Lynne Wilkinson.
In recent decades, we’ve seen massive advances against several types of cancer. In a still unfolding example, South Africa’s massive HPV vaccination campaign is set to slash cervical cancer rates in the coming decades. Biénne Huisman unpacks the details in part 3 of a Daily Maverick and Spotlight special series on cancer in South Africa.
Imagine you have been taking a medicine for years. Then one day you are told at the pharmacy that supplies have run out. In his latest Spotlight column, Dr Andy Gray zooms in on how governments can monitor and plan for such shortages.
It isn’t always easy to know what to believe when it comes to cancer. In part 2 of a Daily Maverick and Spotlight special series on cancer, Biénne Huisman asks whether cancer cases are on the increase in South Africa, and why. On the way, she visits academic corridors and a Limpopo citrus orchard, all while trying to make sense of the available data.
We can keep writing new policies and passing new laws and launching new reforms, but until we confront the human frailties that undermine every system we build, progress will evade us, argues Dr Claire Botha.
All medicines and treatments have to go through lengthy safety and efficacy testing, but this is particularly tricky – and often delayed – for one important age group. Elna Schütz explores the complexities of conducting clinical trials involving babies, and why those complexities are worth grappling with.