South Africa’s health department should assess the inclusion of boys in its public human papillomavirus vaccination programme. This assessment, argues Professor Colleen Aldous, should account for the protection boys could gain, the cost of delivering it, and the work still required to reach girls who miss vaccination and women who need cervical screening and treatment.
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.
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.
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.
Dr Thembisile Xulu is South Africa’s sixth permanent Director-General of health since the dawn of democracy. How will she measure up against her predecessors?
In March 2024, a pivotal clinical trial was launched to evaluate what might well become the first new tuberculosis vaccine on the market in more than a century. As anticipation mounts for the trial to deliver results, Russell Rensburg argues that we need to start preparing for a rollout of the jab, but that we should think of preparation more widely than just the technicalities of regulatory approval and drug supply.
Every three minutes, a child with a cleft lip or cleft palate is born somewhere in the world. While surgery can repair this, Kholofelo Mphahlele argues that the real measure of success is a culmination of a very long journey that plays out in classrooms, on playgrounds, when photographs are taken, and within communities and workplaces.
With plans in motion to roll out universal health coverage in South Africa, Dr Katlego Mothudi, of the Board of Healthcare Funders, argues that revising the compulsory prescribed minimum benefits that medical schemes must provide can be a tool to deliver meaningful improvements today while laying the foundations for a more sustainable healthcare system tomorrow.
A high-profile court case has thrust the legalities of compounding medicines in South Africa into the spotlight. Behind the immediate legal issues, hide a series of unresolved questions about how we should ensure that compounded medicines used in South Africa are safe, argue Professor Renier Coetzee and Lara van Niekerk.
A survey of 49 000 teenagers in the Western Cape reminds us that preventing violence does not begin in a hospital, a police station or a courtroom. It begins much earlier, in families, schools, sports fields, faith communities and neighbourhoods, writes Western Cape Provincial Minister of Health and Wellness Mireille Wenger.
Eight months after the Supreme Court of Appeal gave the green light for specially trained pharmacists to dispense antiretrovirals without a script from a doctor, the programme remains stuck in the starting blocks. With enabling permits now seemingly on the horizon, Angela Tembo and Dr Deanne Johnston ask if there has been sufficient planning to make the initiative a success.