The South Africa Cuba Medical Collaboration programme is a programme of training medical doctors for South Africa in Cuba. This program is a National programme, All provinces except western cape send students to Cuba to Study Medicine and come back to South Africa and service the underserved areas.
Since its inception in 1996, the Nelson Mandela Fidel Castro Medical training programme has enabled South Africa to begin to address the shortage of doctors in the country by sending young aspirant doctors from dis- advantaged backgrounds for medical training in Cuban universities, while also recruiting some Cuban doctors to work in the underserved areas in South Africa.
There are currently 2885 South African medical students in Cuba in various levels of study. No fewer than 590 doctors have already qualified from the training programme, while 98 students are doing their final year in South African medical schools.
KwaZulu Natal has over the years increased their intake of students being sent to Cuba to study Medicine. We have also graduated over a 100 Doctors from the 590 that has graduated from this programme. In Cuba currently KwaZulu Natal accounts for the majority of the students there. More than 200 of which will be com- ing back in 2018 to finish their studies in the South African universities. This means more support is needed to guarantee easy integration of these students in the South African Universities but also to ensure that when they finish and graduate as doctors we have a clear understanding of their role in the KwaZulu Natal Health system.
It must be noted that the better equipped people who can do a better job in ensuring the above happens are the former Students (Doctors who graduated) from this programme hence there is a need to formally organ- ise ourselves to be able to advise the department of health in one voice. It is a shame on our behalf that since the first group graduated from this programme over 17 years ago, we have not succeeded in forming a functional structure that will see us organised and having a voice as an organisation.
We attempted to do this through FUSADOC (Future South Africa Doctors) while in Cuba.
We organised a 3 day Consultative Conference (why did South Africa send us to Cuba? are we ever going to be given a platform to practice the skills we have gained from Cuba or are we going to be absorbed by the system?) We elected a committee to deal with the matters such as the one we are discussing today. The committee never flourished.
This is the opportunity once more to see how we can forge this organisation to be able to deliver on the expectation that we will set for ourselves as a collective.
After the deliberation in December 2017, Cuban Trained Doctors in KwaZulu Natal saw the need to develop this organisation to enable them to have a resounding presence in the health care delivery as partner organisation working with government to ensure quality affordable health care to our people.
The organisation would be called " KZN Cuban Trained Doctors Association"
The interim committee was elected that will see the organisation through to our first Annual General Meeting 2018
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|