Doctors will continue negotiating with the Department of Health in a bid to resolve differences over doctors requiring licences to dispense medicine.
The South African Medical Association (Sama) is currently in communication with the department and has received a ”positive response”, Sama chairperson Kgosi Letlape said on Tuesday.
Although Sama supports the National Convention on Dispensing (NCD) in its legal action against the department, it will ”simultaneously explore avenues of engaging the department to find practical solutions to achieve this goal”, Letlape said.
Earlier this month it seemed that Sama and the NCD had disagreed about the extent to which they should continue to work with the department.
Sama withdrew from the NCD, but subsequently retracted this withdrawal after it became clear that the two organisations were still mostly in agreement.
Letlape said it was all a misunderstanding: ”There were a few issues regarding costs of the appeal, et cetera, that needed to be sorted out.”
He said the two organisations ”agree to the same course of action”.
They will continue with their Constitutional Court appeal, but ”we all still have a desire to engage with the [health] ministry.”
The NCD is appealing against a Pretoria High Court dismissal of its challenge to the rules about special licences for dispensing medicine.
It argued doctors have an inherent right to dispense medicine because of their qualifications.
But the Pretoria High Court rejected the argument, as well as the argument that Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang had exceeded her powers in making the regulations.
The Department of Health has defended the legislation. It believes provisions for dispensing licences are legitimate and constitutional.
”We are confident that despite the opposition to transformation of the health sector, we will be able to achieve the objectives of the Medicine Act — to make affordable, quality medicine available to all South Africans,” it said in a statement.
The regulations came into effect on July 2 after two earlier extensions pending the court’s judgement. This rendered thousands of doctors who have not yet obtained their licences unable to continue to dispense medicine.
The NCD said at the time that less than 2 000 of an estimated 8 000 dispensing doctors in the country had obtained the required licence. — Sapa