RWOPS- light at the end of a dusty tunnel?

888 December 2013, Vol. 103, No. 12 SAMJ The government will hold hospital line managers responsible for ensuring that consultants and doctors deliver at least 56 hours of State work per week – if they are to do any Remunerated Work Outside the Public Service (RWOPS) at all. This will be nationally legislated, Izindaba has learnt. This emerged from Dr Deon Menge, the South African Medical Association (SAMA)’s ‘point man’ for RWOPS and a key member of the national RWOPS committee advising Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, the National Minister of Health. The committee consists of Dr Terence Carter, Deputy Director-General: Hospitals Tertiary Service and Workforce Management, Prof. Errol Holland, Chair of the South African Committee of Medical Deans, Prof. Gert van Zyl, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Free State, his Cape Town counterpart, Prof. Wim de Villiers, and Dr Poppy Ramathuba, Chairperson of SAMA’s Public Sector Committee. Menge, a general surgeon at Pelonomi Hospital in Bloemfontein, said the biggest change to the easily and widely abused current setup will be a standardised protocol across provinces with line managers being held directly responsible for ensuring consultants work their minimum 56 hours per week (40 hours plus 16 hours of paid overtime). Earlier this year, Izindaba foreshadowed and documented several dramatic blowups between consultants on one side and hospital managers and provincial and national politicians on the other, complete with resignations, official threats and nearslanderous accusations.[1,2] A cloud still hangs over scores of consultants under investigation in various provinces for neglecting public patients in favour of lucrative private work. KwaZulu-Natal is even probing the feasibility of proving whether the absence of some consultants from State hospital bedsides can be linked to actual adverse patient outcomes, which have historically cost the province hundreds of millions of rands in civil claims.[2]