Cape Town – Plans to launch a mobile platform for young South Africans to access health tips and useful information are in the pipeline, as the Department of Health takes its promotion of healthy lifestyles a step forward.
Health Minister, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, said he would also use the mobile platform to personally interact with young people and field health or departmental related questions on the platform, as well as invite other health experts from different fields of medicine to do the same.
The Minister was interacting with journalism students from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and the University of Cape Town at the Imbizo Centre, Parliament, on Thursday.
The announcement by the Minister comes not long after the department launched MomConnect, in August last year, a mobile service where pregnant moms are helped to keep track and updated about the health of their unborn infant.
He said the mobile platform, called “Be Wise”, is part of the department’s efforts to promote healthy lifestyles in an innovative way.
“We are going to launch one for you, for the youth, somewhere this month.
“We are going to give you access to health information about health.
“You can communicate with me anytime through that platform. You can get experts who are worried about Nyaope, about dagga, about your future. We are worried about teenage pregnancy, we are worried about abortions,” he said.
The Minister said this when he responded to a question on the use of mobile technology in the health sector.
Minister Motsoaledi said while the department had embraced the use of technology to promote efficiency, he cautioned against phasing out clinical consultations in favour of innovation.
He said the health sector should not be trapped into over-using new technologies and replacing it with the art of medicine.
“I am saying so because that is already happening whereby doctors are more and more relying on machines rather than on clinical knowledge.
“When you come in, before they even touch you, they already sent you for a test under some machine and then send you to another machine. We have actually discovered a lot of many misdiagnosis because of that.
“Medicine still remains an art, the art of clinical medicine where you touch a person, you see them and can be able to use your art.
“In other words, doctors must not be technicians. They must still remain doctors who are practicing so I am just cautioning that while we are embracing this, we must also be very careful,” he said.
MomConnect
The Minister said the MomConnect mobile service had received over 3000 compliments from pregnant mothers ever since it was launched in August last year.
He said this showed that it was having a good impact on many pregnancies.
“In South Africa…we have got one million women who fall pregnant every year and if we must control maternal mortality, we need to know what is happening with those pregnant women.
“Pregnant women register on their mobiles and receive messages every two weeks relevant to their stages of their pregnancy.
“In the second phase, we switch over to the baby ... then we say this is what must happen about breastfeeding, about immunisation etc,” he said. – SAnews.gov.za
