editor

Health Systems Trust (HST) wishes to appoint a Copy and Content Editor to provide editing services to the organisation. The post is based at our Durban office.
This is a one year, fixed-term contract position, renewable based on funding and performance.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

To review and edit all HST publications, reports and other electronic and hard copy information. To ensure all HST texts due for publication are well written, grammatically correct and user-friendly.

REQUIREMENTS

 

A recent report incorrectly stated that 28% of schoolgirls in South Africa are HIV positive, the Health Department said.

"It only applied to a very small area in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, where HIV was prevalent - six or seven schools," department spokesman Joe Maila said.

On March 14, the Sowetan ran the headline: 28% of schoolgirls are HIV positive, based on comments by Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi.

Sapa lifted the essence of the story. Fact-checking organisation Africa Check said the lifted story, with the incorrect percentage, went on to be rewritten and widely distributed until it went global.

Health Policy and Systems Research (HPSR) is often criticized for lacking rigour, providing a weak basis for generalization of
its findings and, therefore, offering limited value for policy-makers. This Reader aims to address these concerns through
supporting action to strengthen the quality of HPSR.

The Reader is primarily for researchers and research users, teachers and students, particularly those working in low- and
middle-income countries (LMICs). It provides guidance on the defining features of HPSR and the critical steps in conducting
research in this field. It showcases the diverse range of research strategies and methods encompassed by HPSR, and it
provides examples of good quality and innovative HPSR papers.

A campaign to boost the low number of black bone marrow donors has been launched in the lead-up to Bandana Day on Wednesday.

 

The Big Issue magazine has partnered with The Sunflower Fund to encourage more black donors to join the South African Bone Marrow Registry with the group making up only four percent of the 65 000 current donors.

This makes it difficult for black cancer patients to find compatible donors.

Bodily tissue-type is inherited from both parents so the closer a bone marrow donor is in genetic makeup the more likely a match will be. It is extremely unlikely that a white person’s tissue type will match a black person’s and vice versa.

The South African Health Review (SAHR) is an annual publication of the Health Systems Trust (HST), which has been published since 1995. The SAHR seeks to provide a South African perspective on prevailing international public health issues, to stimulate debate and critical dialogue and to provide a platform for assessing progress in the health sector.

The health department has called for bids for the next AIDS-drug tender, a move keenly awaited by local pharmaceutical firms that invested heavily in developing capacity to make generic copies of patented antiretroviral medicines. SA has the worlds biggest caseload of HIV patients, with about 5,4-million people infected with the virus that causes AIDS.

Members of Parliaments health committee yesterday heaped praise on health department officials for a detailed presentation of new government policy for stopping mother to child transmission of HIV. They then engaged in a lively debate about the intricacies of the plans. The mood stood in stark contrast to last weeks meeting, which saw committee chairman James Ngculu reprimanding Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang for delegating the job to an apparently ill-prepared official, and ordering her to return better prepared. Yesterday Ngculu joined African National Congress and opposition parties in complimenting the health departments chief director for HIV/AIDS, Nomonde Xundu, for her thorough presentation on the subject.

The Board of Healthcare Funders (BHF) has asked the Competition Commission to exempt medical schemes from provisions in the Competition Act that stop them from working as a collective on matters such as setting tariffs and defining patient benefits. The BHF, which represents 85% of SAs medical schemes, said its application was intended to deal with a host of unintended consequences arising from a ruling by the Competition Commission in 2004 that banned collective bargaining in the sector. The ruling was aimed at fostering competition, but was undermining schemes ability to safeguard their economic future, it said .

HEALTH care in SA is a famously contested sphere, and this year is likely to see intense lobbying by diverse interest groups as the government continues to try to regulate their activities. Several important bills are due to go before Parliament, and key sections of other acts need to be brought into effect. The governments desire to make health care more affordable and narrow the gap between the services available to rich and poor drives much of the legislation that has been passed, or is in the pipeline.