Women reach out to rural areas
Local female medical and dental specialists met with Health MEC Dr Phophi Ramathuba at Fusion Boutique Hotel on August 3.
POLOKWANE – The MEC outlined an initiative in which women celebrate Women’s Month by taking specialist services to rural communities.
The initiative forms part of the Rural Health Matters project, and in honour of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke the programme will run throughout the month of August. Ramathuba said that the programme will be taken to the rural areas where women have fewer options when seeking medical treatment than their counterparts who stay in the city.
“In the rural areas, if you are told you will be operated on at Pietersburg Provincial Hospital in six months, then that’s it, you must wait for those six months and in the process your illness and disease progress. So it is necessary for us to reach out to those areas too,” she explained.
This initiative is an attempt by the department to reduce the mortality and morbidity rate. The MEC stated that the province has come a long way in the health sector and that 42% of health specialists in the province are women.
“When we started, we didn’t have all these specialists. We are now starting to see the benefits of appointing women specialists because when you look at the total number of registrars, out of 84 that we have appointed who are studying, more than 65 are women, which is 77 %,” she added.
Dr Puleng Mokoena-Molepo, a senior specialist in psychiatry expressed said women deserve to be celebrated. “The job of a woman never ends. It is important to prioritise ‘me time’ to avoid the stressors that make them susceptible to mental health problems.”
