Health and Wellness
Which hospitals and clinics have been earmarked for additional staff in the current budget?
I am informed that the Western Cape Department of Health and Wellness is guided by our Health Care 2030 vision of Start well, Live well, Age well, Run well. To give effect to this vision we have identified priorities within each of these dimensions and have already begun the detailed technical work that links human-resource needs, budget allocations, and service pressures.
Because this work is still under way, no single list of individual hospitals or clinics has yet been finalised. Instead, additional posts are being assigned through a transparent ecosystem-based prioritisation process that considers:
Current service pressures across the province: including patient volumes, disease burden, and workload indicators at district, regional, and central hospitals, as well as primary health-care facilities.
Equitable access and continuity of care: ensuring that communities with the greatest need receive appropriate staffing first.
Transversal priorities identified by ecosystem managers: posts that benefit the entire service - for example emergency medicine, maternal and child health, mental health, and surgical waiting-list reductions - have been flagged as urgent in the current Annual Performance and Budget-linked Plan (APL) cycle.
Skills mix requirements: recruitment will not be limited to doctors alone but will include nurses, rehabilitation professionals, pharmacists, and other clinical support staff essential for high-quality care.
The result is that the additional allocation of staff in the current budget will be directed to those facilities, services, and teams where it will have the greatest positive impact, rather than to a predetermined set of institutions. Final facility-level allocations will be confirmed once the technical work, human-resource planning, and Treasury processes have been completed.
