Despite promises from the department of defence to rectify the situation, several first-year medical interns at Cape Town’s 2 Military Hospital have, since January, not received salaries and others are yet to get full wages.
The department said the non-payment had been“identified” and “rectified” and that the interns had received their salaries at the end of April, and that these had been backdated to January.
“After an internal investigation into the challenge experienced by two medical interns at 2 Military Hospital in the Western Cape, it was found that an administrative challenge existed that affected the payment of the two medical interns at the hospital,” said the communications officer, Brigadier General Mafi Mgobozi.
But the interns had not been paid by Wednesday 5 May. And while the department claims the issue relates to two interns, the number appears to be higher.
Last month, the Mail & Guardian received two letters from first-year medical interns employed at 2 Military Hospital saying that seven interns had not received their wages. Other interns were paid but not the full amount.
The interns attribute the reason for not being paid to a delay in finalising their appointment letters.
“The interns were told to keep working despite the absence of appointment letters and contracts because the hospital needed them to do so,” according to one of the letters, the author of which asked to remain anonymous.
The letter continues that despite all interns having to submit their application forms by December 2020 to be appointed, only two had received appointment letters in March.
This was after several interns were told by hospital management to complete new application forms because the initial forms had been “lost”.
By the end of April, the seven interns had signed contracts to work at 2 Military Hospital for the next two years, but compensation still remained an issue.
According to both letters, two interns received “some payment”, described as “warrant vouchers”, that scarcely reached their full salary. One intern is still receiving a student allowance from the department instead of an intern salary, and four others contend they are yet to receive payment.
Akhtar Hussain, chairperson of the employed doctors’ committee of the South African Medical Association (Sama), told the M&G that as of Tuesday 4 May, “some of them still didn’t receive the payments”.
He said Sama wrote a letter to the department on Friday 23 April, after receiving complaints about payments.
Hussain said the department responded on Monday 26 April, assuring Sama that the interns would be paid by the end of that week — on 30 April. But that “did not happen”, he said.
“We are seriously concerned about 2 Military Hospital’s commitment and mismanagement of interns payments not being [on] time,” he added.
Hussain said the fact that the issue had been unresolved for four months was “very bad”, but that it was an annual occurrence at public and private sector hospitals.
Mgobozi said the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) “views the situation as an unfortunate and regrettable incident that has financially disadvantaged the interns in question”, and promised to prevent “a similar unfortunate situation in the future”.
“A proposal will be made to the national department of health [NDoH] to have or consent to registering two [South African Military Health Services] senior staff officers in the Internship and Community Service Programme (ICSP) as a mechanism to ensure collaboration between the SANDF and the NDoH in [the] future with regards to internship deployments and related HR matters.”
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