[SA Medical Journal] The programme which trains South Africans as doctors in Cuba will expand nearly tenfold for the next 5 years, pouring 1 000 undergraduates annually into our currently under-resourced local medical campuses from 2018 onwards. For the past 3 years, the annual output of Cuban-trained South Africans, ’polished up’ in their final year at local medical schools, came to about 8% of the 1 300 graduates fully-trained locally.The sudden acceleration in Cuban training is a crisis intervention aimed at buying time to adjust and expand our local medical training platform so that it can increase local doctor output while continuing to better re-orientate the Cuban ’returnees’ towards South Africa’s very different disease profile.
The last three year’s crop of ’trained-in-Spanish’ graduates currently work as interns or community service officers ‐ and like all Cuban-trained local doctors, will serve 5 years post-internship in their district of recruitment. Izindaba interviewed several players at the heart of planning and executing the controversial programme.
What’s clear is that the debate over the suitability of preventative (Cuban) medical training versus curative (South Africa) training will continue, given this country’s current quadruple burden of disease and ambitious shift towards universal health coverage.
Emphasis added