Health and Welfare Situation Analysis of the Haenertsburg/Tzaneen/ Letsitele/Gravelotte District

The situation analysis of the Halegratz district was conducted before the DW&WMT was appointed. The District Health and Welfare Plan described in this document is therefore preliminary, and will need to be ratified by the DH&WMT. This preliminary plan does, however, provide a foundation on which the DH&WMT can build. This it does by discussing the problems that need to be addressed and the mechanisms of doing this. In the final analysis, it will be the people of the Halegratz district, through their DH&WMT, and the District Health & Welfare Authority (DHWA) who will decide on the best measures to deal with these difficulties. The ISDS is committed to supporting this process, which should result in improvements in the quality of care provided at the site of service delivery.

The ISDS aims to support improvements in quality of health care at the site of service delivery. In the provinces where health and welfare are combined into a single department, the ISDS addresses issues of quality of care in both the health and welfare services. The ISDS provides support to selected districts across the country, with the aim of transferring the lessons learned and successes achieved to other knock-on sites. The ISDS works together with the National and Provincial Departments of Health (and Welfare in cases where the two are combined), to ensure that ISDS activities are not stand alone interventions but that the lessons learned ramify across various levels of health provision.

The ISDS started working in the Haenertsburg/Letsitele/Gravelotte/Tzaneen (Halegratz) district in the Northern Province in February 1998. The implementation of the district health and welfare system (DH&WS) in the Halegratz area was well under way before the ISDS became involved. District boundaries had been clearly demarcated and the plan to implement the DH&WS had been pit in motion. The district had been sub-divided into 5 local areas (i.e. sub-districts), and 5 supervisors were managing health facilities in the local areas. The process had been thought through. The DH&WS was officially launched in the Halegratz district in March 1998 by the Superintendent-General of the Department of Health and Welfare in the Northern Province. At that time, the appointment of a district health and welfare management team (DH&WMT) was imminent. The Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) or District Managers for the 24 districts of the Northern Province were formally appointed as of the 1st September 1998. The ISDS continues to work in the Halegratz district, with the CEO and the DH&WMT.