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Health Professions Council suspends investigation of Groote Schuur's CEO Bhavna Patel and Prof. Andrew Nicol

The Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) has abandoned or suspended the investigation of my November 2017 complaints against Groote Schuur Hospital's CEO Bhavna Patel, Trauma Centre's Prof. Andrew Nicol, head of the Western Cape Health Department Dr Beth Engelbrecht and others.

They have not responded to my communications despite telling me in 2018 I would be informed in December of the outcome of the preliminary inquiry. As we already know, the organisation is seriously dysfunctional as has been reported over the years (see here, here and here for some of the reports about it including the outcome of a ministerial task team investigation).

Trauma Centre doctors Ahmed Al Sayari, Mikhail Botha and Marcelle Crowther are implicated in my mother's suspicious death on 7 July 2017 and Nicol and the others for refusing to investigate which is required by health laws. Premier Helen Zille too refused to investigate.

From September 2017 we laid criminal charges of assault, culpable homicide violations of health laws, fraud and crimen injuria with the police. They did not properly investigate that and the circumstance of her death, which provisionally was an inquest inquiry.

Cape Town's director of public prosecutions (DPP) declined to prosecute and refused to give reasons why. They referred it to an inquest but the case was bounced around the city's court jurisdictions. Apparently, no-one wanted it and there were "problems" with it.  During a phone call in June last year Cape Town magistrate Ingrid Arntsen told me she had "heard something", i.e. problems, about about it.

I gave up on the DPP last April.  They wrote to me since then and last January 2019, but I filed the letters unread. I wrote about this case in this blog.

After unexplained, unsatisfactory and prejudicial delays, responding to my email in October last year about our complaints, HPCSA's legal officer Keabetswe Mokwena replied they were on the Committee of Preliminary Inquiry’s agenda for 29 and 30 November 2018 and I would be contacted of the outcome during December. 

However, neither she nor anyone else responded to my subsequent emails in January and March.  They are dysfunctional and in violation of the national health laws and its own regulations it’s meant to uphold and defend. Its conduct is outrageous and unacceptable. 

In the absence of a response from the legal department and inquiry committee, on January 24 I referred the matter to the Office of Health Standards Compliance (OHSC) wherein I also complained about the HPCSA’s conduct which I suspect, as I experienced before in a 2001 complaint also about Groote Schuur, is influenced and compromised by the case's political sensitivity. It's ironic, a complaint about one regulator to another, and neither doing anything substantial to improve the lives of citizens.

Today I shall write to the HPCSA's incoming registrar and CEO Dr Raymond Billa and request, even at this late stage, he investigate what happened, why the matter was delayed so long and the legal department’s refusal to contact and keep me informed. But I don't expect much from him as his organisation exists to serve the status quo and its members' interests.

So far it's two out of three - DPP and HPCSA - pre-emptive "cases closed". Only the OHSC investigation remains, and already were reluctant to take it despite not having the details (see here).

Update

Billa emailed me on April 2 acknowledging receipt of my letter.  He said he will "look into" my complaint of their report back within five working days. He noted my "disappointment and scepticism" of the council and his office but assured me the HPCSA is an "advocate of the public".

Later in the day I received a phone call followed by an email from a legal officer/investigator who said she had just been handed the case. She gave me a progress report. However, she had not had time to review the file fully.

The case has not been abandoned, but it appears to me it was dormant. The committee is waiting for an additional statement from Nicol (the committee met at the end of November 2018) which was sent about two months ago.

Note she apologised on behalf of the council.  I shall wait for Billa's report.

Minor updates 25/06/2019.


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