Health

CSI’s healthy collaborators

10 May 2010

Private sector moneys in CSI, carefully used, can cause a tipping point to success when used in partnership with the state and in collaboration with top-of-the-range NGOs.

 Written by Paul Pereira, Tshikululu Social Investments Executive: Public Affairs.

Quality of health is critical in every nation and maintaining a healthy population therefore an obvious priority in all countries. In developing economies such as South Africa’s however, doing this means a strong level of partnership between the public and private sectors. Opportunities for this abound.

A bit of background: South Africans pull their weight when it comes to basic healthcare provision, whether carried out through state institutions or private medical insurance and care. Indeed, the amount spent each year on private healthcare outstrips the public, with the latter accounting for 41,7% of national health expenditure these past two years, according to the annual SA Survey.

But that does not imply that the state has been tardy. Public and private together, SA spends US$437 per capita a year, in comparison to Brazil’s $371, Botswana’s $362 and India’s paltry $36.

Our service problems lie in the vast numbers and proportion of people relying on a public health system whose share of the national budget is already generous by international standards but which budget has largely to tread water through unavoidable obligations to personnel expenditure, critical medications rollouts on a mass scale, capital infrastructure maintenance, and the like. This isn’t to excuse blunders that have taken place in public health policy direction and practice, only to acknowledge that the state’s financial room to manoeuvre in health care provision is necessarily limited.

This is why private sector moneys in CSI, carefully used, can cause a tipping point to success when used in partnership with the state and in collaboration with top-of-the-range NGOs. Relatively small amounts can extend the quality and reach of the public service in ways that have impact-to-scale.

Thus Tshikululu’s facilitation of R60 million funding to healthcare work in 2009 was used in strategic projects that positively affect overall healthcare delivery. One example is the partnership that Discovery, Anglo American and De Beers have in funding the SA Red Cross Air Mercy Service. This “œflying doctor” operation receives most of its funding from the Department of Health, and brings volunteer medical personnel to patients in far-flung places, and people in medical need to public health institutions (with an astonishing 45 000 patients flown in 2009 alone).

For its part, the Momentum Fund‘s Orphans and Vulnerable Children programme helped in a substantial way to bring comprehensive services top 43 077 direct beneficiaries in 2009, a critical area of work, given that 450 000 children between the ages of 12 and 18 years have lost both their parents, leaving 2,6% of this age group as head-of-household.

The year saw the Anglo American Chairman’s Fund‘s support for the work of the Starfish Greathearts Foundation bring psychosocial care and direct resource support (such as nutrition, healthcare, school fee exemptions arrangements, school stationery and school uniforms) to 40 000 vulnerable children.

The De Beers Fund remained a core supporter of the Limpopo work of Africa Health Placements, an energetic organisation that remarkably places more foreign health practitioners into our public hospitals than the state itself.

These examples are just tasters of what is happening on a far greater scale in a quiet, positive and collaborative way between South Africa’s public health authorities, corporate social investors, and select NGOs.

With healthcare consuming the second largest amount of CSI spend after education, and in the sometimes acrimonious debate about public versus private healthcare provision, these fundamental and critical collaborations should not only be remembered, but cry out for emulation.