Our health programme partnerships were recently featured and published by Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism: https://bhekisisa.org/bhekisisa-tv/health-beat/2026-05-18-health-beat-38-lets-not-wait-for-the-nhi-what-these-teams-do-together-to-make-healthcare-work/. This is content reposted from their newsletter and website:
Efforts to change our health system through a National Health Insurance scheme are tied up in court, awaiting rulings on whether public input was taken seriously enough. But while policy debate continues, on the ground, partnerships are quietly transforming care.
Our team travelled to remote villages like Nqileni on the Wild Coast, where accessing healthcare has long meant walking for hours, crossing rivers, or forking out for transport. But collaboration has changed that.
What began as a small eco-tourism project has grown into Bulungula Incubator, a community-driven initiative tackling, among other things, health. Community healthcare workers run like well-oiled machines, visiting households, monitoring child development and supporting parents. A simple medicine pick-up point has evolved into a close-to-home mini-clinic, with government staff.
The lesson is clear: when communities lead, and partners support, healthcare can work.
- The National Health Insurance Act awaits a Concourt ruling on two cases, leaving official health reform in limbo. But it doesn’t mean the system isn’t being reworked. People-centred healthcare is alive at centres as diverse as Nqileni Clinic on the Wild Coast, and busy Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town.
- Their successes — notably Groote Schuur’s palliative care unit — can be attributed to partnerships with the community, and private institutions and team work among government health facilities.
- In North West Province, paraplegics are becoming professional basketball players, nurtured at Gelukspan District Hospital, which has a unique rehabilitation unit. Here communities are trained to take care of their disabled family members and have embraced wheelchair basketball, despite substandard equipment and borrowed facilities.
- At Nqileni, community healthcare workers run like a well-oiled machine. They go from home to home to do health checks, deliver chronic medication, and support mothers and children. The programme has been running for 20 years — refining a model of care that works.
- The lesson we learned is that when communities lead, and partners support, healthcare becomes accessible and effective.