Stepping into the top seat at the South African Medical Association in February plunged Mzulungile Nodikida into the middle of dealing with topical issues such as the National Health Insurance, salaries for doctors in the public sector and the high number of unemployed medical professionals.
After having been involved with the association for about a decade, you could say that I understand the association very well, he says.
He tells Sean Christie how he went from playing soccer and cricket while at school in the Eastern Cape to studying medicine in Cuba and how his career path moved from seeing patients every day to shaping systems for helping doctors give people quality care.
In todays newsletter , content editor Linda Pretorius gives us a look into the life of the new Sama CEO, Mzulungile Nodikida. Sign u p .
Life has been hectic for Mzulungile Nodikida since his appointment as CEO of the South African Medical Association (Sama), a non-profit professional organisation representing the interests of medical doctors and uniting doctors for the health of the nation, according to their website.
I came onboard when Sama was in the middle of organising its annual conference in February, which we delivered successfully, I think. Then we plunged straight into the regional expert meeting of the World Medical Associations Declaration of Helsinki , which was held in Johannesburg a few days later, he says, accounting for a couple of meeting postponements.
Now we must face the issues. Theyre topical; Im sure youve heard of them, he says, chuckling at the understatement, and indeed one would have to have been living under a rock to miss the issues to which he refers, like the inexorable progress of the South African governments National Health Insurance (NHI) plan , going from policy to law .
Samas vociferous and sustained opposition to NHI has been hard to miss, too. In place of a central funding system for health services, Sama, Nodikida explains, has been advocating for a system based on primary healthcare (PHC) principles, focusing on what the World Health Organisation calls the health system building blocks , which includes leadership and governance, service delivery, health system financing, health workforce and several other components. Sama has strongly advocated against the underpayment of public sector clinicians , too, and consistently chafes the government about the concerningly high number of unemployed doctors in the country.
