Medical school

Closing date: 14 December 2007
Salary: R369 000 per annum (MMS Inclusive Package) (Ref. G26965/6) - Klerksdorp/Tshepong Hospital Complex

Closing date: 12 May 2006

The Department of Public Health at the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine is seeking to appoint a Course Administrator for a fixed term period of one (1) year, this is a full day position.

A new study documents for the first time the devastating exodus of doctors from Africa and the Caribbean to four wealthy English-speaking nations, the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia, which now depend on international medical graduates for a quarter of their physicians.

The regular Wits Clinical Skills Workshops will again be offered in 2005. The format will be similar to previous courses, with each participant being offered a chance to do 5 skills stations during the day. Participants will be given a chance ahead of time to book for their preferred stations. As before, the focus will be on practical skills relevant to rural hospital and general practice. Interested doctors are invited to enroll.

Medical interns who work a hospital shift up to or exceeding 24 consecutive hours are more than twice as likely to have a motor vehicle crash and five times as likely to report a near-miss incident than interns who do not work an extended shift, a study in the Jan. 13 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine finds. And, for every extended shift that an intern worked per month, the risk of any motor vehicle crash increased by 9%, while the likelihood of a crash on the commute home from work increased monthly to 16%, according to the nationwide, Web-based survey of 2,737 first-year medical residents. The study also found that interns averaged 70 hours per week in the hospital, during which time they reported being awake for 67 hours, or 96% of the time. Interns reported working an average of 3.9 extended work shifts each month, each with an average duration of 32 hours.

30 JUNE 2001

Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has launched a programme to address the shortage of doctors in the country, particularly in rural areas. Speaking in Johannesburg today ( 29 March 2004), the minister said although the country was producing a sufficient number of doctors through its eight medical schools, these doctors were being unevenly distributed due to their movement from rural to urban areas, public to private sectors and across the borders of the country.

The University of Witwatersrand has launched the country's first web-based medical curriculum in line with global trends to produce better doctors. It is expected this new approach to medical training will create doctors of a superior quality and calibre in tune with world technology developments and increase research capacity. It is also expected to change the face of medical education in SA by offering students online access to early clinical exposure through digitised x-rays, specimens, histology slides, laboratory results and literature. Students will also now be allowed to write the theory component of their exams online. The university has secured a donation from the US-based trust, Atlantic Philanthropies, to extend these resources to other medical schools in the country in order to build SA's critical mass of high-tech, quality doctors. Prof Max Price, head of health sciences at Wits, hailed this new system as an important advancement in science and technology in SA, saying it would prepare graduates for a world of medicine that will be dominated by (information technology). We are at the forefront of combining medicine, education, training and information technology in SA, he said yesterday. This new approach aims to make learning more dynamic and interactive for students, while maintaining the high standards of learning and education to which we are accustomed. The online curriculum, piloted since January, would give students access to visual and multimedia resources at any time of the day.He said the web-based curriculum was a more efficient and comprehensive way of learning as it exposed students to real life cases. This system of learning allows us to integrate different learning resources from the various science disciplines, enabling teaching to be much more realistic by linking learning to what's being done in a clinical setting. (Source: Sharda Naidoo: Business Day, 14 August 2003)

There is a major shortage of doctors in rural areas in South Africa. About 46% of the population in South Africa live in non-urban areas (1), and they do not always have the same access to health services as their urban counterparts. One example is Mount Frere district, where the doctor to population ration is 1:30 000 (2).

More than 70 percent of the medical students surveyed by their class representatives have said they would rather leave South Africa than face two years of internship after studying. A plan to double the one-year internship was endorsed in January by Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and the health ministers of the nine provinces.The plan was devised by the Health Professions Council of South Africa, which determines the content of medical training. It would mean that, including the obligatory year of community service after internship, many students would have 10 years of training and service to complete before they were free to do as they chose. Salih Solomon, student representative of the fifth-year class at the University of Cape Town's Medical School, said a snap survey had found that between 70 percent and 75 percent of students in his year would seriously consider leaving the country rather than do the two-year internship.At the Free State University, the figure among fifth-year students was between 80 percent and 90 percent, said Karl le Roux, of the Junior Doctors'Association of South Africa (Judasa). At Natal University the figure was 92 percent of 196 fourth and fifth-year medical students, Le Roux said. Not just white students, but large numbers of black and coloured students are also thinking of leaving. The reality is probably that, if they had to do two years of internship, between 25 percent and 30 percent of the students would leave in 2005. But even this is a disaster for health in South Africa. Interns worked about 100 hours a week, Solomon said. The health department had reportedly proposed cutting their salaries by about R1 400 a month, Le Roux said, in which case interns would receive around R4 000 after tax. Objections to the plan were raised by students and junior doctors at a three-hour meeting last week between the health department and Judasa, the South African Medical Students Association, student representatives and divisions of the South African Medical Association. The concerns raised were that the health system could not adequately accommodate an extra 1 000 interns every year, that they would be paid less, and that more doctors would leave the country. Tshabalala-Msimang's spokesperson, Sibani Mngadi, said the department was considering the students' objections. The reason for the proposal to double the internship period was that interns were insufficiently trained when they entered community service, Mngadi said. We would like to make sure that people who work in our hospitals have enough experience to work independently. Community service is mostly in rural hospitals, he said. Judasa has proposed, instead, that junior doctors should be better trained within the current internship and community service system. Among other things, these doctors could all do their first six months' community service in a primary, rural or district hospital and their second six months in a secondary or tertiary hospital. A one-year internship period would become obligatory this year for clinical psychologists, radiographers, physiotherapists, dieticians, occupational and speech therapists and environmental health officers, Mngadi said. Nurses would have to do community service by 2007 - and we hope sooner -Mngadi said. The African National Congress resolved at its recent Stellenbosch conference that community service should be extended to other professions, including lawyers and teachers. ( Source: The Cape Times, 11 March 2003).