What Covid-19 revealed about health systems
The impact Covid-19 has had on NHI is an interesting question, but more relevant perhaps is asking what the pandemic has taught us about our healthcare system, argues Professor Alex van den Heever, chair in the field of Social Security Systems Administration and Management Studies at the Wits School of Governance.
Van den Heever says the pandemic has shown that the centralisation of power often creates what he calls a “single gatekeeper” for activities, such as distribution and procurement. “If you have all your eggs in one basket, and this is what we learned from the Covid-19 experience, is that if they mess up, they mess it up for everybody. That’s the problem with poor centralised designs that you give too much power to a centralised structure, [and] if they fail, it fails for everybody,” he says.
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