The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) has decided to cancel the Cuban Medical Training Programme, describing it as wasteful expenditure.
The South African Military Health Service says it will not send additional medical students to Cuba.
But it says students that are already there will be allowed to complete their medical courses.
SANDF spokesperson Siphiwe Dlamini says, “The instruction to review the relationship of training students in Cuba, was issued by the previous minister for us to review the training and that has been subsequently done. There were various options that were looked into by the programme and indeed one of the issues was that the students needed a bridging course when they came back because of language issues and probably some of the courses that they were doing. But I think in my view, foreign students in general, would have to go through a SAQA process, and a bridging course- it’s not only the Cuban trained doctors that do that.”
