OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Thursday
NEW regulations paving the way for apartheid chemical warfare expert Dr Wouter Basson to be provisionally suspended from medical practice are nearing completion, the Health Professionals Council of SA said this week.
Basson is being tried for of a series of murders and fraudulent transactions apparently committed while he was head of the state’s chemical warfare programme, but has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.
Earlier moves to provisionally suspend Basson failed after a High Court set aside a council decision to suspend another doctor who was also facing criminal charges.
The court ruled that the council had no regulations in place relating to professional conduct inquiries.
Council legal services manager Rachelle van der Walt said the regulations were almost ready to be submitted to the Department of Health for ratification.
“As soon as they are approved and promulgated, we are going to hit Dr Basson without delay. We already have enough ammunition to suspend him pending the outcome of his court case,” Van der Walt said in Pretoria.
“Our legal department is currently involved in the drafting of the required regulations as a matter of priority,” Van der Walt told a media briefing this week.
She said her department was often bombarded by calls from people wanting to know why Basson had not been provisionally suspended.
On other queries reaching her department, Van der Walt said about 15000 complaints were being lodged every year.
About half of these related to allegations of professional incompetence by registered medical practitioners.
The rest involved people complaining about excessive medical fees, rude behaviour by doctors, and sexual harassment of patients.
Only about 10% of complaints received culminated in a formal disciplinary inquiry, Van der Walt said.
A backlog of about 430 outstanding professional conduct inquiries, some dating as far back as 1980, were inherited from the former SA Medical and Dental Council.
Most of the inherited cases are expected to be completed by the end of the year.
“Our vision for the future is to attempt to finalise a complaint within one year after it is received,” Van der Walt said.