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Why Is SA Not Dealing with its Psychological Trauma? – The hidden costs [BizNews.com]

 

In this sequel to his ‘problem statement,’ outlining the pervasiveness of trauma in our daily South African lives [published on Biznews earlier this week], trauma activist Brian Rogers asks why our public health system has not dealt with psychological trauma, and continues to ignore its’ huge societal costs. As a former News Editor at the SA Medical Journal, I’ve written about the debilitating cost of not treating mental health properly – equal to some two percent of our GDP, UCT’s Psychiatric Department estimates. The greatest irony is the cost to care of actually carrying out our official policy of decanting mental health services from hospitals to primary health and community health clinics. The State has mothballed or rationalized its large mental health facility centres – but failed to expand custom-designed facilities at primary healthcare level, leaving our population worse off than before. It’s just one of the many unintended consequences of officials brainstorming and then implementing fine-sounding policies without asking the critical question; ‘yes, but how?’ Our healthcare human resource crisis is not going to be solved anytime soon – regardless of how many thousands of South Africans we send to Cuba to learn primary health care-oriented medicine or how many thousands more mid-level clinicians or nurses we produce to plug the gaps. A quadruple burden of disease, of which trauma is a huge contributor, and population expansion, will ensure that our dismal healthcare practitioner-to-patient ratio stays the same for 15 years to come. Find me a committed State social worker who’s been in the field for more three years or more who hasn’t burnt out, or is close to burnout. Ditto your medical office (junior or senior). Rogers argument is coherent, diligently researched and a clarion call to action. You can look forward to the final part of this trilogy (‘the Solution’) next week. – Chris Bateman

“At the 2012 National Health Summit, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi called for greater awareness, better planning and a move away from a “Hospicentric approach” to the treatment of Mental Illness. He described South Africa’s Mental Health Services as fragmented, unfairly distributed and inadequately resourced. “We know that there continues to be over-reliance on Psychiatric Hospitals as the mode to care, treatment and rehabilitation” Motsoaledi said. South Africa has continued to follow the colonial, “Hospicentric approach”, and in doing so have neglected critical aspects of Primary Health Care. He said that it is an offence against human rights¹ and the country’s constitution to neglect the worse off in society.” SAFMH²

[For more of this story, written by Brian Rogers, go to https://www.biznews.com/health...trauma-hidden-costs/]

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