Although South Africa is blessed with an abundance of resources, our challenge is how to efficiently distribute what we have. Healthcare is a prime example. With more than enough government and private healthcare funding, and a requisite nurse and doctor to patient ratio across the system, affordable access to quality healthcare should be available to us all. So what’s going wrong and how do we fix it? To answer that question we must first look back so we can move forwards.
Before the end of apartheid, everyone in South Africa used government healthcare services. That ended when we entered our new democracy. The transitional government believed social solidarity would retain our wealthier population in the public health system, subsidising national infrastructure. Instead, the transition precipitated the creation of the private healthcare industry, which remains unregulated to this day.
In 2019, the Competition Commission issued a report that looked into the prevailing business practices of private healthcare in South Africa. The findings of the report, titled The Health Market Inquiry, concluded that this sector worked against the health of the people they claim to be looking after. However, the inquiry only described the state of the healthcare as it stood, without suggesting specific required regulatory reforms.
The thinking is that these much-needed reforms will be a cornerstone of the creation of the National Health Insurance (NHI). At its core, the NHI will pool national funds to, in part, pay for the basic and most-needed quality health services for everyone in South Africa. Currently, the bill required to create this fund is under review, following feedback from various healthcare, civil society and political groups.
There are a number of concerns surrounding the implementation of the NHI. One issue is the unequal distribution of all manners of healthcare resources. Due to this, NHI will currently be unable to offer an equal basket of services to everyone in the country, excluding many from the treatment that they have a right to receive.
So how can we bridge the gap between available resources and access to quality care in an affordable manner? This is where our recently launched app, Kena Health, aims to provide a solution.
Kena Health allows anyone with a smartphone to chat to a doctor, nurse or mental health professional. Through the app, you can receive medical advice, diagnoses, prescriptions and sick notes. In cases where a health professional cannot assist, Kena Health becomes your gateway to the rest of the healthcare system through referrals to a specialist, GP room or even the ER off the app. This means that no matter who you are, be it a 62 year old man living on government grants in Limpopo or a CEO of a bank living in Bryanston, you will receive the same standard of high quality care at an incredibly affordable price.
