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Mobile phones have the potential to improve access to healthcare information and services in low-resourced settings. This study investigated the use of mobile phones among patients with chronic diseases, pregnant women, and health workers to enhance primary healthcare in rural South Africa. Qualitative research was undertaken in Mpumalanga in 2014. Semi structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 113 patients and 43 health workers from seven primary healthcare clinics and one district hospital. Data were thematically analysed. We found that some health workers and patients used their own mobile phones for healthcare, bearing the cost themselves. Patients used their mobile phones to remind themselves to take medication or attend their clinic visits, and they appreciated receiving voice call reminders. Some patients and health workers accessed websites and used social media to gather health information, but lacked web search strategies. The use of the websites and social media was intermittent due to lack of financial ability to afford airtime among these patients and health workers. Many did not know what to search for and where to search. Doctors have developed their own informal mobile health solutions in response to their work needs and lack of resources due to their rurality. Physical and social factors influence the usability of mobile phones for healthcare, and this can shape communication patterns such as poor eyesight. The bottom-up use of mobile phones has been evolving to fill the gaps to augment primary care services in South Africa; however, barriers to access remain, such as poor digital infrastructure and low digital literacy., (Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

In this article, we consider the conduct of post-apartheid health care in a policy context directed toward entrenching democracy, ensuring treatment-adherent patients, and creating a healthy populace actively responsible for their own health. We ask how tuberculosis treatment, antiretroviral therapy, and maternal services are delivered within South Africa's health system, an institutional site of colonial and apartheid injustice, and democratic reform. Using Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian notions of governmentality, we explore provider ways of doing to, for, and with patients in three health subdistricts. Although restorative provider engagements are expected in policy, older authoritarian and paternalistic norms persist in practice. These challenge and reshape, even 'undo' democratic assertions of citizenship, while producing compliant, self-responsible patients. Alongside the need to address pervasive structural barriers to health care, a restorative approach requires community participation, provider accountability, and a health system that does with providers as much as providers who do with patients.

Community health workers (CHWs) affiliated with community-based organisations are central to the implementation of primary health care in district health services in South Africa. Here, we explore factors that affect the provision of and access to care in two provinces - Gauteng and Eastern Cape. Drawing on narratives of care recipients and the CHWs who support them, we illustrate the complex issues surrounding health maintenance and primary care outreach in poor communities, and describe how the intimate interactions between providers and recipients work to build trust. In the study we report here, householders in Gauteng Province had poor access to health care and other services, complicating the impoverished circumstances of their everyday lives. The limited resources available to CHWs hindered their ability to meet householders' needs and for householders to benefit from existing services. CHWs in the Eastern Cape were better able to address the needs of poor householders because of the organisational support available to them. Based on an ethos of integrated and holistic care, this enabled the CHWs to address the recipients' context-related needs, and health and medical needs, while building greater levels of trust with their clients.

Background: Many low- and middle-income countries are reforming their health financing mechanisms as part of broader strategies to achieve universal health coverage (UHC). Voluntary social health insurance, despite evidence of resulting inequities, is attractive to policy makers as it generates additional funds for health, and provides access to a greater range of benefits for the formally employed. The South African government introduced a voluntary health insurance scheme (GEMS) for government employees in 2005 with the aim of improving access to care and extending health coverage. In this paper we ask whether the new scheme has assisted in efforts to move towards UHC. Methods: Using a cross-sectional survey across four of South Africa's nine provinces, we interviewed 1329 government employees, from the education and health sectors. Data were collected on socio-demographics, insurance coverage, health status and utilisation of health care. Multivariate logistic regression was used to determine if service utilisation was associated with insurance status. Results: A quarter of respondents remained uninsured, even higher among 20-29 year olds (46%) and lower-skilled employees (58%). In multivariate analysis, the odds of an outpatient visit and hospital admission for the uninsured was 0.3 fold that of the insured. Cross-subsidisation within the scheme has provided lower-paid civil servants with improved access to outpatient care at private facilities and chronic medication, where their outpatient (0.54 visits/month) and inpatient utilisation (10.1%/year) approximates that of the overall population (29.4/month and 12.2% respectively). The scheme, however, generated inequities in utilisation among its members due to its differential benefit packages, with, for example, those with the most benefits having 1.0 outpatient visits/month compared to 0.6/month with lowest benefits. Conclusions: By introducing the scheme, the government chose to prioritise access to private sector care for government employees, over improving the availability and quality of public sector services available to all. Government has recently regained its focus on achieving UHC through the public system, but is unlikely to discontinue GEMS, which is now firmly established. The inequities generated by the scheme have thus been institutionalised within the country's financing system, and warrant attention. Raising scheme uptake and reducing differentials between benefit packages will ameliorate inequities within civil servants, but not across the country as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]