A crucial hotline run for nearly 20 years from the slopes of Devil’s Peak in Cape Town for healthcare workers anywhere in South Africa, from the country’s busiest urban hospitals to far flung resource strained rural clinics, has been suspended due to a lack of funding.
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.
From counselling about small nodules to overcoming people’s fears of needles, Biénne Huisman takes the pulse of a new HIV prevention injection’s rollout in the Western Cape.
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.
Ten months after an enabling court judgment, some pharmacists in South Africa can finally start applying for permits that allows them to dispense HIV prevention pills without a script from a doctor. Catherine Tomlinson reports.
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.
A new antiretroviral combination pill that is taken only once a week appears to work as well as daily pills at treating HIV. This is according to interim study findings to be presented next week at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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.
Propelled by an early vision to help others, Dr Abba Mallum tells Biénne Huisman about his roots in Borno State, about opportunities in Stellenbosch and Durban, and about his pioneering PhD in radiotherapy and oncology.
