Kanya Ndaki

January 2005 will be a nerve-wracking month for hundreds of newly qualified professional nurses who will be waiting to be told where they will serve a year’s community service. But it will be an even bigger logistical nightmare for the Department of Health with just five months to ensure the latest programme of compulsory community service kicks off smoothly.

Mpumalanga’s health department, once viewed as corrupt and inept, is getting back to business. When Hussein Verachia was appointed head of the department last year he inherited what he refers to as a "dysfunctional department". These are polite words to describe the situation he found.

Sister Jeanette Joubert has spent the past 23 years driving distances of up to 3 000km a month to reach patients in the harsh, dry conditions of the North West. It is no easy job providing basic health-care services in a province where 65% of the more than three million inhabitants live in rural areas. In the second in our series on the state of health systems in the provinces, we look at the North West.