By Graham Craig, Medical Protection Society (MPS) Business Development Director
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A new year provides an opportune time for individuals and organisations to take stock and look ahead to what the next 12 months will look like.
For MPS, 2024 will be the start of a new era with Karen Miller soon taking over as CEO following the retirement of Simon Kayll, who was in the role for 12 years.
Karen - MPS’s first female CEO - has spent a large part of her career in South Africa and brings extensive experience from the insurance industry, including five years as CEO of ABSA General Insurance. Karen joins us in February and I am looking forward to working with her.
This experience that Karen will bring to the leadership of MPS will be vital as we continue to expand our South African-based team of medicolegal and dentolegal experts and lawyers.
Her appointment and MPS’s continued expansion come at a time when healthcare professionals in South Africa are facing a number of challenges.
Recent research undertaken by MPS shows that mental wellbeing for most of the profession is worse now than during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Staff shortages, high workloads, poor workplace conditions and even load-shedding are taking their toll, while investigations launched by the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) continue to be drawn out over several years, causing pain and anguish for those involved.
In addition, uncertainty about the future direction of healthcare in South Africa is causing tremendous concern for the profession.
We have seen the impact that these immense challenges are having on doctors, dentists and other healthcare professionals right across the country.
As my esteemed colleague, Dr Volker Hitzeroth, has previously pointed out, when doctors face numerous challenges, it can have a negative impact on their mental wellbeing and this can jeopardise patient care.
In the context of the above-mentioned challenges, it is no surprise that there continues to be high demand for our services and our ability to support MPS members with so many cases over the past 12 months has been in no small part due to our discretionary indemnity approach.
As a non-profit, discretionary mutual organisation, our default position is to see how a member seeking assistance can be helped, not whether their claim fits the policy they signed up to.
It is this unique approach that has served MPS and its members in South Africa so well for the past 65 year as it means we can be flexible in determining the assistance that we can provide when new issues arise in healthcare (which may not have been known when, say, an insurance policy is taken out).
And in an ever-changing market such as South Africa, discretionary indemnity means we are perfectly positioned to offer help in unusual circumstances or where unique problems arise.
It is for this reason that in the year to October 2023, we agreed to assist in more than 99.5% of all requests that met our basic qualifying criteria. Basic qualifying criteria means whether the person making the request was a member at the time of the incident, the request was within the scope of membership and they were indemnified for the type of work or procedure that is the subject of the claim.
It is these results and the support that we have provided that has helped ensure our membership remains strong, with more than 33,000 members in South Africa.
Meanwhile, we continue to operate in a way that ensures the income we generate in South Africa stays in the country and is used to support members, continually improve the service we provide, and invest in our growth in South Africa.
All of this underscores just how much we value members in South Africa and shows that we are here to stay for the long haul.
While MPS cannot predict the future or what challenges or opportunities may arise for the healthcare profession in the upcoming years, we can assure our members that we will be there to support them.
2023 may have been a challenging year for many, but at MPS we are proud that we were able to provide support to those who required it and look forward to doing the same in 2024.