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’s public healthcare system finds itself caught between two incomplete revolutions – the democratic dream of a decentralised District Health System, and the march toward National Health Insurance. Health systems experts argue that structural changes won’t save a system that is scared stiff. The most urgent task facing the system, they say, is to help frontline doctors and nurses reimagine what is possible.
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.
Precious Matsoso tells Biénne Huisman how, over three decades, she helped shape some of the most consequential health policy negotiations in South Africa and in global governance. She also shares memories about her Soweto childhood filled with music, science, and political uprisings.
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?
For years, hospitals have relied on the unpaid, unprotected labour of trainee-specialists to fill their rosters, but these doctors are reaching a breaking point. Joan van Dyk reports.
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.
South Africa has an ageing population of people living with HIV. For the first time a set of clinical guidelines maps out a framework to help keep this group of people healthier for longer, reports Elna Schütz.
A court battle over blocked access to Johannesburg clinics has exposed how responsibility for ensuring access to healthcare services is divided between national, provincial and local government. Ahead of local government elections in November, Christina Pitt investigates where exactly the dividing lines lie.
The fire that engulfed parts of Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital was never just a fire, it was a warning, argue Dr Haseena Majid and Professor Mogie Subban. Five years later, the real question they say is whether South Africa is prepared to listen.
Provincial debt to the National Health Laboratory Service is not just a financial governance matter, but also a public healthcare service delivery risk that affects diagnoses, treatment, disease surveillance, and government’s ability to protect vulnerable patients, writes Faith Muthambi, chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Health in the National Assembly.
Shut down by the apartheid government for providing care to child patients of all races, Durban’s Addington Children’s Hospital is well on its way from a ghostly ruin into a lifeline for a new generation thanks to visionaries like Professor Hoosen Coovadia. Biénne Huisman spent time inside the historic KwaZulu-Natal Children’s Hospital with its striking artworks and wards named after birds.
