Category: Ethics and Law

Categories : Environmental Effects Ethics and LawTags :

Opinion Piece: Ripples of Change toward Building a World of Water Equity and Unity

On By ModernMedia

By Robert Erasmus, Managing Director at Sanitech

Photo by Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash

World Water Day 2024 resonates deeply in South Africa, where access to clean water remains a significant struggle for many. Recent protests sparked by water scarcity highlight the urgency of this issue, reminding us that water is not just a resource, but a fundamental human right.

This year’s theme, “Leveraging Water for Peace,” calls for unity and recognition of water’s universal significance. As we face the reality of inequality, it is important for us to renew our commitment to equitable water access for all, by fostering dialogue and taking action that is deeply rooted in empathy and ubuntu. Every drop should bring not only sustenance, but also the promise of peace and prosperity.

Connecting local struggles to global issues

South Africa’s water challenges mirror broader global concerns. Ranked a worrying fifth in global water risk, we share these strained resources with our neighbours. This interconnectedness cannot be ignored, and neglecting this truth is likely to fuel regional tensions. Instead, by highlighting our shared challenge, we can strengthen our position and emphasise the need for collaborative solutions. The depth of South Africa’s water scarcity isn’t just a domestic issue – it’s a regional one. Our ranking among the world’s worst puts us alongside stressed neighbours, suggesting the potential for cross-border conflict over shared resources.

Internally, competition between formal and informal users already creates friction, amplified by seasonal rainfall and inadequate infrastructure. To make matters worse, poor sanitation further contaminates water sources, escalating the crisis. The Institute for Security Studies’ Public Violence and Protest Monitor shows that in South Africa, community frustrations with water and sanitation delivery failures resulted in 585 cases of public protest between January 2013 and April 2021, of which incidents, 65% escalated into violent protests.

Aligning with the water rights framework

Although South Africa boasts a progressive water rights framework, our efforts must align with this framework, ensuring that the fight for water equity remains central to our pursuit of peace. Empowering communities with access to clean drinking water and sanitation and upholding water rights are essential steps toward conflict prevention.

Raising awareness is essential, but tangible action holds the key to progress. Businesses can play an important role in acknowledging South Africa’s water scarcity and investing in corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects that focus on addressing sanitation and water quality in the communities in which they operate. From an individual perspective, it is important that each citizen does their part to conserve water, while supporting organisations that work on improving water access, and raising awareness of related issues within their communities. At a government level, it is critical to prioritise infrastructure maintenance, address sewage contamination, and collaborate with regional partners and industries on sustainable water management strategies, to prevent civil unrest by addressing water equity issues.

Tapping into Ubuntu and empathy

Ubuntu, the South African philosophy of shared humanity, encourages us to understand and share the experiences of others. Cultivating empathy across communities, businesses, and government fosters inclusive dialogue and collaborative solutions. With the principles of ubuntu in mind, it is critical to address sewage contamination to preserve our scarce water resources. It is essential for municipalities and provincial governments to invest in infrastructure upgrades to reduce water loss and improve delivery.   Businesses operating within the sanitation and water treatment sectors have the potential to empower communities by providing filtration and treatment solutions for local water sources. Moreover, the broader private sector can contribute to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives aimed at enhancing sanitation and water quality in vulnerable communities.

Amplifying voices through collaborative communication

Empowering community voices is vitally important. This can be achieved through increased awareness on water scarcity and its impact, as well as by supporting local initiatives that improve water access and quality. Based on the principles of ubuntu, we must advocate for the facilitation of open communication between communities, businesses, and government. Water advocacy groups such as South African Water Caucus (SAWC), and water project NGOs such as the Mvula Trust must continue to advocate for increased funding for water and sanitation projects, by holding the government accountable for meeting water rights and supporting regional cooperation on water management.

Uniting for peace and prosperity

In this way, individuals, organisations, and governments can turn the promise of World Water Day into tangible progress by working together. In prioritising equitable water access, addressing underlying challenges, and fostering collaboration, we can build a future where every drop flows towards peace, not conflict. Remember, water scarcity and strife does not have to be our inevitable future. Through collective action and commitment, we can ensure that this precious resource serves as a bridge to peace and prosperity for all.

Categories : COVID Ethics and LawTags :

Pretoria High Court Judgement On COVID-19 Vaccinations

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

On 05 January 2023, the COVID Care Alliance NPC and other applicants brought an urgent court application against the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA), including the President of the Republic of South Africa and others to prevent people from being vaccinated.

The applicants wanted the court to order that all COVID-19 vaccines programs must be stopped and that all COVID-19 vaccination sections in healthcare facilities in South Africa must be closed, and the effective withdrawal from circulation of the vaccines. The applicants also sought an order interdicting the approval of vaccines for emergency authorisation or registration.

On 27 February 2024, the Pretoria High Court dismissed with costs an application filed by the applicants on the grounds that the applicants do not have the right to prevent others, who do not share in their beliefs or opinions, from being vaccinated.

SAHPRA submitted evidence to the Court to show that the applicants’ attempt to prevent government from using vaccines to address the COVID-19 pandemic was misguided, and the applicants heavily relied on hearsay and speculation, as well as supported their arguments with the opinion of persons who were not experts.

Source: SAHPRA

Categories : Ethics and LawTags :

Global Health Photographers Navigate Murky Ethical Waters for Clients

On By ModernMedia

Photographers report moderation, enhancement, and staging of global health images to meet the marketing goals of clients – while photographers react to these practices with resistance and routinely push back, the problem persists as the demand for global heath visuals continues

Photo by William Bayreuther on Unsplash

Global health photography is often caught between photojournalistic intentions of accurately reflect local communities, and marketing directives to create attention-grabbing imagery, according to a study published February 14, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Arsenii Alenichev from Oxford Population Health, the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, and colleagues. Standing at such representational crossroads, photographers are forced to engage with numerous – and often unresolvable – ethical and practical dilemmas.

Photographers are often commissioned by non-governmental organisations and agencies to document the pain and empowerment of others, with a goal to yield donations and attract attention to issues in communities. While photojournalism is often framed as objective, simply by being present, photographers interfere with local communities and can face challenging ethical dilemmas. To better understand how global health photographers operate and ethically obtain consent from subjects, the authors interviewed 29 photographers reflecting the demographic realities of the field about the moral and practical challenges they face on the job. The authors identified common themes across the anonymized interview transcripts to highlight major issues faced by global health photographers.

The authors found that in the current global health landscape, organisations often direct photographers to quickly create attention-grabbing marketing images to compete with mainstream ads. Photographers typically have to work with client-created ‘briefs’ detailing what images they need to take, and with limited time and resources. In practice, it pushes photographers to increasingly sanitise, sensationalise, or stage scenes to produce the desired image – misrepresenting the realities of local communities, especially in the Global South, to which photographers react with resistance. Acquiring ethical consent from subjects is also complicated by power imbalances, language barriers and illiteracy, and misplaced fear and trust in both the photographer and the legal documents they are asked to sign. Given these emergent themes, the authors argue that organizations should push for a more photojournalistic approach to the creation of global health images, weighing ethical clarity over potential economic sacrifice. While their sample of respondents may have been biased towards critical perspectives, the authors believe that this broad overview of tensions will equip other researchers to conduct future studies of more localised, nuanced experiences.

The authors add: “Decolonisation of global health and its visual culture will prove impossible without taking the ethical experiences of photographers seriously, especially the local ones. Global  health images should  not be understood as neutral depictions of interventions – they are in fact political agents participating in the formulation of stereotypes about people and entire communities.”

Categories : Ethics and Law PaediatricsTags :

Murder-accused Paediatric Surgeon Advised that Procedures Were Unnecessary

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

A state witness in the trial of murder accused Dr Peter Beale has testified that colleagues advised him against a procedure which led to the death of a three year old patient.

Paediatric surgeon Beale is charged with three counts of murder, as a result of deaths from unnecessary surgeries over 2012 to 2019. He is also charged with two counts of fraud. He was first arrested in 2019, with his trial date postponed multiple times and only getting underway this week Monday in Johannesburg. His co-accused, anaesthetist Dr Abdulhay Munshi, was shot dead in 2020. As a result of the case, some have voiced concerns over what could lead to criminalisation over deaths resulting from unavoidable errors and systemic failures.

Two of the three deaths stemmed from laparoscopic Nissen fundoplication, a complex and costly procedure that is usually used to treat GERD by tightening the junction of the oesophagus and stomach.

According to the indictment, Beale is accused of “unlawfully and intentionally” causing the deaths of a three-year-old boy in 2012, a 21-month-old girl in 2016 and a 10-year-old boy in 2019 after he had operated on the children.

The state contends that Beale performed these unnecessary procedures as he needed money to recover from heavy financial losses incurred in a failed investment in the 1990s.

News24 reports that, based on a rectal biopsy, Beale believed that the three year old boy had Hirschsprung’s Disease, requiring surgical intervention. As reported in Beeld, Beale said in his plea explanation that he “misread” the patient’s biopsy results and did not deliberately misrepresent the biopsy results to the parents.

The parents sought a second opinion, the state alleges, and the second doctor was hesitant about carrying out the procedure. Beale was able to convince the other doctor that the procedure was necessary based on the biopsy results. Beale also explained in his plea deal that there was a variant of the disease, and the treatment was the same. His counsel, Advocate Ian Greene, also pointed out that the pathologist testified at a disciplinary hearing that the biopsy did not exclude the variant even if it did not exclude Hirschsprung’s Disease.

According to News24, a state witness, who is another paediatric surgeon who remains anonymous at the court’s order, stated that Beale had tried to recruit him to a Ponzi scheme. The scheme had a joining fee of R1 million.

The witness, who had know Beale since 1996, said that in 2009, the accused had also confided in him at a conference that he had suffered significant losses in an investment. The witness was also on the committee at the Healthcare Practitioners’ Council of South Africa disciplinary hearing over the three-year-old’s death. Beale has since been struck from the HPCSA.

The South African Medical Association released a statement urging that, while tragic, the case highlights laws that criminalise and punish individuals instead of taking into account the various organisational failings that can lead to patient deaths and can in no way prevent “unavoidable errors”.

Note: this article has been updated to correct the number of laparoscopic Nissen fundoplication procedures and to add more information about the Hirschsprung’s Disease diagnosis.

Categories : Ethics and Law Injury & TraumaTags :

Male Murder Rate is a National Health Priority, say Researchers

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash

By Daniel Steyn

A study by researchers at the South African Medical Research Council (MRC) recommends that the murder of men in South Africa deserves an urgent national response.

Richard Matzopoulos of the MRC’s Burden of Disease Unit and his team, which included scientists from the UCT School of Public Health, studied postmortem reports from 2017 to compare murders of women and men. Among the factors looked at were cause of death, age, geographic location and whether alcohol played a role.

The study, published in PLOS Global Public Health, found that 87% of people murdered in 2017 were men. The authors note similar percentages in 2009 (86%) and 2000 (84%). 

According to the researchers, this is the first study on male murders in South Africa. Previous studies have focused mainly on femicide (the killing of women). The study focused on 2017 to coincide with the third national femicide study (previous femicide studies were in 2000 and 2009).

The researchers faced challenges getting the paper published in a peer-reviewed journal. Dr Morna Cornell, one of the study’s authors, told GroundUp that men’s health is generally understudied. Cornell believes “we are living in an outdated paradigm which regards all men as powerful and able to navigate health systems etc, and therefore less deserving of care”.

The most common causes of death among male murder victims were sharp stabbings and shootings. For people between the ages of 15 and 44, rates of male murders were more than eight times higher than female murders. The Western Cape has the biggest gap between male and female victims: for every female killed, 11.4 men were killed.

Male murders peaked over December and weekends, suggesting the role alcohol plays.

The study aims to challenge the idea that men are “invulnerable”.

“The fact that men are both perpetrators and victims of homicides masks the strong evidence that men are extremely vulnerable in many contexts,” the study reads.

Murder in South Africa is concentrated in poor neighbourhoods where the effects of poverty and inequality are most significant. According to the study, “violence has been normalised as a frequent feature of civil protest and political discourse”.

High levels of firearm ownership and imprisonment also contribute to violence in South Africa.

“Men are socialised into coping by externalising through anger, irritability, violence against intimate partners and others, and increased engagement in risk-taking behaviours. This, alongside the high levels of violence to which males are exposed across [life], [causes] a continuous, and often intergenerational cycle of violence,” the study says.

While the study acknowledges that “violence against women is endemic in South Africa, with rates almost six times the global figures”, it argues that “men’s disproportionate burden of homicide has not resulted in targeted, meaningful prevention”.

Interventions recommended by the researchers include stricter control of alcohol and firearms, programs to address societal norms that drive physical violence, and efforts to overcome the root causes of poverty and inequality.

Professor Richard Matzopolous, the main author of the study, told GroundUp that more research is needed to understand risks and interventions, especially in a South African context.

“Phase 2 of this study will explore victim/perpetrator and situational contexts,” said Matzopolous.

Republished from GroundUp under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Source: GroundUp

Categories : Ethics and Law HospitalsTags :

Cracking the Whip on Fraud, Waste and Abuse at This Week’s BHF Forensic Unit Indaba

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

A realistic update on the amount of funds lost to fraud, waste and abuse in the South African healthcare environment as well as a special address dedicated to the value and protection of whistle blowers will lead discussions during the annual Board of Healthcare Funders (BHF) Healthcare Forensic Management Unit (HFMU) Fraud, Waste and Abuse (FWA) Indaba at The Houghton in Johannesburg on Wednesday, 22 November.

Convened to coincide with International Fraud Awareness Week and to be moderated by BHF Forensic Unit chair, Dr Hleli Nhlapo, the Indaba spotlight will be on “Strengthening a Culture of Integrity and Accountability – New Strategies for a Corruption Resistant Future “ – subject of the keynote address.

The event will once again endorse the BHF’s representative role as a guardian of the interests of medical schemes, administrators and managed care organisations not only in South Africa but also Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Malawi and eSwatini.

To this end an unprecedented feature this year will be a panel discussion by Southern African Development Community (SADC) members on strengthening anti-corruption efforts in the SADC Region with cross-border co-operation.

“Promoting the culture of whistle blowing and the protection of whistle blowers” will be a significant key point on the Indaba agenda with the promise of a lively discussion on the encouragement of whistle blowing with the non-negotiable proviso that specific mechanisms should be put in place for corruption reporting without repercussions. 

Until last year fraud, waste and abuse losses in South Africa were generally estimated at just under the R30-billion mark, but as pointed out by the Special Investigating Unit’s Advocate Andy Mothibi at the BHF Conference earlier this year, this figure was likely to be a lot higher.

Fraudulent activities relating to false claims was still a major contributing factor to these losses, he explained, alluding to an observation that anything between 5% and 15% of all medical aid claims could include elements of FWA.

Spurious activities in this regard will no doubt emerge in some of the answers to the Indaba agenda question “Is there ‘Rent Seeking’ in our Healthcare System?” – “rent seeking” being an economic term for an individual who or an entity which seeks to increase their own wealth without creating any benefits or wealth by activities which aim to obtain financial gains and benefits through the manipulation of the distribution of economic resources.

In the same vein, the discussion on “Cracking the Code: Uncovering and Combating Organized Crime Networks in Healthcare”, should shed light on current FWA challenges followed by collaborative measures to counter these such as the use of the HMFU FWA portal introduced four years ago with the prime objective of combating healthcare fraud, waste, and abuse.

Another important element of FWA which has risen to the fore particularly since the successes of the SIU, has been the recovery of lost funds. This will be the focal point of a presentation “Navigating the Road to Restitution: Strategies for Successful Civil Claims Recovery in Healthcare” during which a series of steps to recover losses from wrongdoing or fraud in healthcare are scheduled to be presented.

Going by previous deliberations on the topic, these are likely to emphasise the need for a dedicated legal team with healthcare law and fraud recovery expertise and a commitment to justice for fraud and misconduct victims.

The day’s proceedings will conclude with the SADC member panel discussion on “Cross border Co-operation: Strengthening Anti-Corruption Efforts in the SADC Region”.

Members are expected to deal with important issues such as, not least, the protection of whistle blowers, as well as encouraging healthcare workers in their specific countries to report corruption risk-free with the promotion of law enforcement capabilities and related awareness campaigns.

Categories : Ethics and LawTags : 1 Comment

Terminally Ill Patients Need More than Prayer from Spiritual Leaders

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Rodnae Productions on Pexels

A study conducted among advanced cancer patients in Soweto has found that most patients who received palliative care and are at the end of life, have spiritual needs beyond regular prayers from spiritual leaders. Furthermore, patients who received religious or spiritual care had less physical pain, used less morphine and had higher odds of dying where they wish than those who did not.

The study involving 233 participants was conducted by a team of local and international experts led by Wits researchers.

Lead researcher Dr Mpho Ratshikana-Moloko from the Centre for Palliative Care in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Wits University says that previous research has shown that religion and spirituality are important to most patients facing life-threatening illnesses. However, this study probed further.

Using the African Palliative Care Association Palliative Outcome Scale, the research confirmed previous international findings that nearly 98% of the participants had a religious or spiritual need.

The most common spiritual need expressed by patients in Soweto was “seeking a closer connection with their God” and “forgiveness for sins”, says Ratshikana-Moloko. This finding is of significance because it calls on faith leaders to provide relevant support that responds to the needs of patients. This research-led intervention empowers leaders to move beyond prayer, explains Ratshikana-Moloko.

“This is the first study to assess the spiritual and religious needs, and religious and spirituality care provided to advanced cancer patients who received palliative care in Soweto,” says Ratshikana-Moloko.

Since the study was concluded in 2018, Wits University has developed a course in Spiritual and Chaplaincy in Palliative Care. The first cohort of faith leaders from all religious backgrounds completed in September 2023.

Palliative care to increase

Palliative care is one of the key pillars in illness management among terminally ill patients who are judged by a specialist physician as unlikely to benefit from curative-intent therapy. Often, patients are unlikely to survive beyond six months.

The South African National Policy Framework and Strategy for Palliative Care (2017–2022) incorporates spirituality into health care. However, palliative care services in South and southern Africa and elsewhere, rarely address these needs, despite available policies, guidelines and evidence.

“We have to implement what we know. The integration of spiritual care within the clinical care setting is recommended,” Ratshikana-Moloko.

South Africa faces a heavy burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases. One in six deaths globally is due to cancer, and cancer diagnoses are expected to increase by 70% in the next two decades, especially in low- and middle-income countries.

“Failure to identify and address the religious and spiritual needs of terminally-ill patients may increase distress and suffering,” Ratshikana-Moloko.

Categories : Ethics and Law Expert OpinionTags :

Medical Gaslighting: When Conditions Turn out not to be ‘All in the Mind’

On By ModernMedia

By Caitjan Gainty, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, King’s College London

Photo by cottonbro studio

Gaslight, a psychological thriller starring Ingrid Bergman, was a box-office hit when it was released in 1944, but its time in the limelight could have ended there. However, the ruse employed by its villain gave the work remarkable staying power.

Set in 1880s London, the story plays out in the upper-middle-class, gas-lit home of Gregory and Paula Anton. Gregory is intent on making Paula think she is going insane so that he can have her committed to a mental institution and claim her inheritance. He attempts to convince her that the gas lighting in their house, which the audience can see is flickering, is not really flickering. What her senses tell her is a lie – a sign of her steady descent into madness.

Today, the term “gaslighting” is widely used to describe psychological manipulation, where a person is made to doubt their perception of reality. Politicians are accused of it, as are celebrities. The term also used in discussions about health.

Medical gaslighting refers to cases in which a healthcare practitioner imposes a pattern of questions, testing or diagnosis that runs counter or tangential to the history or symptoms the patient is describing or experiencing.

There is usually a clear power imbalance at play. More often than not, gaslit patients are women, members of the LGBTQ community, people of colour and older adults.

It is a painful reminder that medicine does not occupy a rarefied space apart from society and history. Those who are socially, culturally, politically or economically marginalised don’t find that this experience suddenly changes when they walk through the clinic door.

In many ways, the term gaslighting is an apt fit for medical settings, especially when it comes to the common refrain: “It’s all in your head.”

One of the best-known examples relates to heart disease, where a woman’s symptoms are twice as likely as a man’s to be simply written off as mental illness. This missed diagnosis is often explained by the fact that women’s heart attack symptoms are “strange and unpredictable” (compared with a man’s “normal” symptoms). However, that excuse doesn’t hold water – there is a large overlap in heart attack symptoms between the sexes.

Elsewhere, social media and news reports are full of egregious examples of women being medically gaslit. There are those whose cancer reached an advanced stage before they could get a doctor to take them seriously. And those whose lives were imperilled by a doctor who dismissed their pain as anxiety, as postpartum depression, as not nearly as bad as they think it is.

Examples of medical gaslighting also accrue around chronic but poorly understood diseases. In recent years, there’s been the medical community’s slow and halting recognition of long COVID. Before that, it was long Lyme disease or chronic fatigue syndrome, as Jennifer Brea’s 2017 documentary Unrest movingly shows.

Algorithmically out of whack

Yet medical gaslighting is a far more complex creature than gaslighting in other contexts. While Gregory’s attempts to gaslight his wife were malicious and intentional, medical gaslighting quite often overlaps with a more basic problem in medicine: misdiagnosis.

In many cases, misdiagnosis occurs not because an individual doctor is being malicious or even intentionally – though perhaps unconsciously – prejudiced, but because the symptoms they observe in the patient before them are “algorithmically” out of whack with the standard set of symptoms and characteristics they have been taught to look for and associate with different diseases.

Since these algorithms were explicitly built around heterosexual white men, it makes sense that the vast majority of those who have experienced medical gaslighting or misdiagnosis hail from beyond this extremely narrow band of the population. But even at a more basic level, individuals are simply not standard. Human bodies don’t conform as closely to the algorithms as medicine would ideally like them to.

“The bottom line,” as one doctor put it, “is that diagnosis is hard.” It does not help that research into diagnosis is never as well-funded as research into treatment.

That’s not to say there aren’t any covert (or overt) Gregory Antons out there in medical practice, of course. But it does mean that if we want to address medical gaslighting, the answer is probably not as simple as training medical professionals to be more sensitive to their patient’s descriptions of their symptoms.

Indeed, the very foundation of modern medicine agitates against this kind of attention to individual symptoms, asking medical professionals instead to measure patients against a set of standards – to think statistically as they make their diagnostic decisions.

Until a much greater part of society is included in that statistical reckoning, we can expect medical gaslighting to remain a part of our medical experiences. And even if or when that happens, our system will still be one that grapples with the difficult task of matching the emphatically square holes of symptom and diagnostic categories with the differently shaped realities of individual symptoms and illness experiences.

The Conversation

Republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons License. Read the original article.

Categories : Ethics and LawTags :

Elevating Patients’ Voices for Greater Healthcare Safety

On By ModernMedia

With four in ten patients injured in primary and outpatient healthcare and 134 million adverse events occurring on the back of unsafe care in hospitals globally every year,1 World Patient Safety Day aims to address the avoidable challenges that will bolster patient safety across the healthcare spectrum.

Even in an era marked by incredible innovation and advancements in medical science, the reality is that within the four walls of the hospital environment, patients continue to face preventable challenges that could potentially threaten their health and well-being.

Recognising the seriousness of this, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched its World Patient Safety Day initiative in 2005 to increase awareness of unsafe healthcare, and to drive high-level support and commitment to address patient safety issues across all parts of the world.2

Bada Pharasi, CEO of the Innovative Pharmaceutical Association of South Africa, adds that under the theme of “engaging patients for patient safety”, World Patient Safety Day 2023 is positioned to recognise the crucial role that patients, families and caregivers play in safety in the healthcare sector.3

“Patients are the core of all healthcare systems, and evidence shows that when patients are treated as partners in their care, significant gains are made in safety, patient satisfaction and overall health outcomes,” explains Pharasi.

Patient safety is fundamental to delivering quality and essential health services and prevents and reduces risks, errors and harm to patients. A cornerstone of this lies in continuous improvement based on learning from errors and previous adverse events that have impacted patient well-being.  

More than 10% of patients have experienced harm due to negligence during treatment, and alarmingly, this has resulted in over three million deaths globally every year.5 Even more concerning is that up to 80% of these instances are avoidable, with the most significant factors accounting for these errors being related to misdiagnosis and the prescribing and use of incorrect medications.1

“An integral part of addressing this plight is to elevate patients’ voices,” adds Pharasi. “This can be accomplished by ensuring that patients are involved in policy formulation, represented in governance structures, engaged in co-designing safety strategies, and are active partners in their own care.”3

Here, patients should enquire why the medication has been prescribed, how long the medication will take to resolve symptoms if the medication can be taken with others, and what are the potential side effects of the medication.6

Furthermore, patients should be cognisant of not taking medication prescribed to someone else, discarding medicines that have passed their expiry date, never exceeding dosage recommendations, carefully reading the patient information leaflets included with medications, and being aware that some medications may contain addictive substances.

For patient safety strategies to be successful, patients need to report instances where they have been prescribed the incorrect medication and the adverse effects it may have caused. To report these, patients can record their complaints on the Med Safety app, the SAHPRA e-reporting portal on its website, or via email or telephone.7

“As IPASA, we are committed to a healthier South Africa and a patient-centred healthcare system. We support the WHO mandate to ensure safer patient treatments and outcomes, and strive to continue informing healthcare professionals and patients about the benefits and risks of pharmaceutical products. In doing so, we believe we can make a notable difference in ensuring patient safety across all facets of the South African healthcare sector,” concludes Pharasi.  

References:

Categories : Ethics and Law HospitalsTags :

Whistleblower Spills More Details of Alleged Fraud at Mediclinic Hospitals

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

The furore over claims of fraudulent account manipulation happening at Mediclinic hospitals continues to grow, as the initial whistleblower responded to a challenge for more information by providing a detailed list of of starting points for investigators, according to Daily Maverick.

Widely reported in media outlets such as News24, Radio 702, and eNCA, the initial email alleged that hospital codes were being altered to ones which drew higher remunerations from medical aid schemes and therefore which financially benefitted the hospitals. They further claimed that no action was being taken against employees who were engaging in this practice, which was supposedly happening at six hospitals.

The Council for Medical Schemes noted that hospital charges to beneficiaries had increased by nearly 19% from R7039.74 in 2020 to R8346.40. Just over 92% of the total hospital expenditure was paid to private hospitals.

Greg van Wyk, CEO of Mediclinic Southern Africa, was also emailed among the initial recipients. He responded swiftly, writing in a reply to all the cc’d recipients last week that Mediclinic had appointed Steven Powell, head of law firm ENSafrica’s forensics practice, to head its independent audit.

The Mediclinic CEO also challenged the anonymous whistleblower to come forward and reveal themselves, the whistle-blower then responded with an email cc’d to medical schemes and the media. The email contained extensive of details of the alleged fraud – plenty of information for investigators to get started with.

The whistle-blower told News24 that, for example, “When a patient died in a hospital emergency room, sometimes Mediclinic case managers were expected to change their accounts to reflect an ICU death instead. This is because of the fixed fees associated with emergency room deaths, which are lower than ICU-related fees.”