South Africa: The real everyday world of state doctors

In this article about the state of South Africa's public health system, a doctor relates her experience of working on a trauma ward. 'We shouldn’t, however, allow our feelings about how perfect we expect nurses and doctors to be to blind us to the real problem, which is the shambles in which the Department of Health has left our healthcare system,' she writes. 'It is not clinicians on the ground who decide how many hospitals there should be, how many beds those hospitals should contain, what services those hospitals should offer, and how well those hospitals should be staffed. Those things are decided by administrators, as they should be. Those administrators are appointed by the Department of Health, also as it should be. And the Department of Health is run by a bunch of politicians, who are doing the most terrible job of representing the interests of the people who put them there.'