HEALTH management reforms in Namibia should go much deeper than changing managers here and there. Namibia needs to amend its present health law in order to change the current medical system of management to a real health system of management. This is particularly true when it comes to public hospital management in Namibia. The current law stipulates that medical doctors should manage Namibian public hospitals. That is, by the present law, the heads of public hospitals in Namibia must be medical doctors, with the title of ‘medical superintendent’.
People elsewhere have moved away from this model of hospital management to a model where hospital heads are qualified hospital managers, usually with the title of ‘director’ or ‘chief executive officer’.
It is also wrong to call the head of a hospital the ‘medical superintendent’ because it gives the impression that this person is just there to attend to medical matters in the hospital and not to the management of the hospital as a whole.
Moving a medical doctor from a ward to the office of the ‘medical superintendent’ will not improve hospital management in Namibia. Being a good medical doctor does not necessarily make one a good hospital manager. Those who have experienced this would probably confirm it.
The present health law hinders qualified hospital managers and other non-medical health managers from managing public hospitals. It must be amended to facilitate this. For example, experience shows that the best managers in the Namibian health system are nurses. But because of the present law they cannot be appointed to head public hospitals simply because they would not qualify to be called ‘medical superintendents’.
Managing hospitals is not an exclusive domain of medical doctors. If there are no qualified hospital managers, any health professional (nurse, pharmacist, radiographer, etc) with potential can be trained and appointed to become a hospital manager as is sometimes done with medical doctors.
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