Following my last post, I have been reflecting further on the failures in public health care in South Africa since 1994. In doing so I reread a book, “Yenza – a blueprint for transformation”, published in 1998 that has been on my bookshelf since then. I worked with the author, Dr. Piet Human, on several occasions during the early days of my time as Head of the Free State Department of Health. Read some twenty years later, the optimism, idealism and hope of the years immediately after 1994, reflected in the book, are poignant given what has transpired since. The opening sentences of his book read as follows: “The present…
-
-
Quality … the Holy Grail often sought but never found?
I have just finished reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” for, I think, the third or fourth time. The book, subtitled, “An Inquiry into Values”, has little to do the motorcycle maintenance other than in an allegorical sense but rather explores the journey of the author Robert Pirsig in pursuit of understanding the meaning of “Quality” against the background of a two week motorcycle trip across America from Minneapolis to San Francisco. The author of this unique book and best seller over the last forty years was committed to a mental institution earlier in his life, probably with a form of catatonic schizophrenia and subjected to electro-convulsive therapy…
