Traditional Health Practitioners Act | Proposed regulations to formalise sector

CAPE TOWN - Efforts to regulate traditional health practitioners is receiving resistance in some quarters.

Just a few weeks ago more than 100 traditional healers protested in Cape Town, against the proposed legislative framework.

The implementation of the Traditonal Health Practitioners Act of 2007 is aimed at formalising the sector, and professionalising it.

Among some of the proposed regulations is mandatory registration, minimum training periods, and other administrative requirements.

Dr Fikile Vilakazi is the Chairperson of the Traditional Health Practitioners Council, tasked with this massive undertaking.

Dr Vilakazi explained, "we have a problem in South Africa of bogus healers. We have a problem of people who are scamming communities and users of traditional health; who are professing to be healers and yet they are not."

"There is an element where you do need to regulate, in some way, to ensure that you don't get, for example: people rising up and saying we are healers and we want to heal people."

"We are seeing people dying in the name of traditional health, being given the wrong prescription, incorrect medication, also in some instances just really being scammed so regulation is important in that sense."

"What is the point of contestation is how the regulation is being done. Where traditional health practitioners arising in protest in all provinces saying, 'We do not refuse to be regulated as healers but we are disturbed by the fact that the National Department of Health together with the Council of Traditional Health Practitioners continues to do this without consulting us as healers,' that is the message that is coming out today."

"The regulations and the law shows that have happened, healers are saying, 'We're not in the room. We were not invited. You only really selected your favourite few to sit and speak on our behalf,' so the call is to say if you're going to regulate - speak to us as traditional healers because we are the people who are affected."