Johannesburg – The Gauteng Health Department said that it would use its R59.4 billion budget allocation to continue to prioritise the filling of critical posts and that includes the R1.1 billion meant to fill the Covid-19 response costs, which are 50% less than the previous year.
Speaking at the post-budget vote media briefing by MECs in the social and governance cluster in Johannesburg, Health MEC Nomathemba Mokgethi said that following demonstrations at the Chris Hani Baragwanath and Helen Joseph hospitals, the department had adopted a new approach to retaining the affected staff.
“We then decided to have an approach for all the academic hospitals and the tertiary hospitals. We then said the four plus three must retain their staff 100% and then the cluster heads will then have to meet with the districts and primary healthcare facilities into checking the workload and whether there is a need to decentralise some of the services,” said the MEC.
Mokgethi explained that the money was not an additional allocation to what was earlier pronounced by the finance MEC.
She said that they encouraged healthcare workers who were on the Covid-19 contracts to apply for the newly advertised posts in the department.
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