Wits University's Donald Gordon Medical Centre

IN AN effort to improve ongoing upgrades in health service delivery, the City's health department has decided to join forces with Wits University's Faculty of Health Sciences - the Community Paediatrics Unit, the Centre for Health Science Education and the School of Public Health.

The decision was taken because the City felt that academic institutions had the potential to provide invaluable contributions to the public health service policies through training, conducting pertinent research, practical evaluation of theory and the monitoring of health promotion programmes.

Working with the Community Paediatric Department means that Council can now strengthen the delivery of health services to children. According to 2001 Census figures, children under the age of five years constitute 8,2 percent of the population.

Of grave concern is the infant mortality rate - 48 for every 1 000 live births - and the increase in this rate since 1998, attributed largely to HIV/Aids with seven percent of births in Gauteng said to be HIV-positive.

"Our contribution would be to use our training, education and research programmes to develop City Health services" explained Haroon Saloojee, head of Paediatrics at the university. "We have actually co-operated with the City of Johannesburg for about the past five years. However, in the last two years we have begun to formalise partnerships with them."

The Centre for Health Science's contribution to the partnership will be to monitor and improve health promotion strategies in the City. Health promotion has been identified as the cornerstone of primary health care and entails educating communities about health issues, enabling them to increase control over and improve their health.

The proposed partnership agreement hopes to encourage students and trained health workers to apply their skills and knowledge of Health Promotion techniques within the City.

The University's School of Public Health will provide assistance in the training of health professionals and the development of training programmes for TB services in the City, a high priority as the surge in the number of TB cases has spurred on a reassessment of the current control programme.

Both parties will also identify research areas that will improve the delivery of the TB control programme by monitoring patient transferral. It has been found that many TB patients diagnosed at hospitals are transferred to primary health care facilities for continuation of their treatment, but a significant number never reach the referred clinics.

The School of Public Health has already, in collaboration with Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, set up a TB centre at the hospital to facilitate the transfer of patients from hospitals to primary health care clinics.

By the end of April 2004, 5 000 TB patients were registered at the centre. Ninety percent of the patients referred to the clinics in the Johannesburg district were successfully referred compared with 50 percent in 2002.

The centre also carries out research projects on effectiveness and efficiency of the centre, numbers and types of patients with TB, referrals of suspected TB patients from health facilities to Baragwanath hospital and a study of TB management at health centres in Soweto.

"We currently have a few existing partnerships with Wits Medical School. We are reaching finality on the Memorandum of Understanding that deals with these new partnerships," said Councillor for Health, Prema Naidoo. "This is the way in which we are extending our services to the people."