Thomas Johnson - Medical Blog

I sent Dr Beth Engelbrecht, the head of the Western Cape Health Department (WCHD), Premier Alan Winde and Wendy Philander, DA chair of the WC Parliament Health Committee a report of my assessment of the WCHD's service. This followed an exchange of emails with Engelbrecht last week in which I told her about my experience at Abdurahman Community Health Clinic last month. In my email I referred to Daily Maverick's uncritical interview of her about the department's first clean audit and her giving themselves top marks for performance managing a "burning platform" (see here ). I contradicted their good news story with known problems about and my and users' poor assessment of facilities. She replied, "Thank you for your mail. Please accept my unreserved apology for your negative experience of our services. We strive to be as best we can and what you have experienced is very unfortunate. I fully agree that a clean audit reflects good governance, yet the pa...

The Cape Town office of the National Prosecutions Authority (NPA), aka the director of public prosecutions, is reluctant to open a corruption case against the Health Professions Council (HPCSA) and medical committee member Prof. Elmin Steyn after last month directing me to lay a charge with the police. In this blog (see here and here ) I relate how this came about. In May the HPCSA's Third Committee of Preliminary Inquiry cleared six doctors and their superiors implicated in my mother's death in 2017 at Groote Schuur Hospital (GSH) and for covering it up. The decision was irrational: they ignored the law and their own precedent for similar cases, and the inquiry was procedurally flawed having violated inquiry regulations. There was proven bias and conflict of interest. Committee member Steyn[1] of Stellenbosch University and Tygerberg Hospital, had a prior and ongoing personal-professional relationship with one of the accused, Prof. Andrew Nicol of UCT and GSH. On Augus...