The Free Market Foundation says government should transfer ownership and control of state health institutions, including hospitals, clinics and laboratories, to public health sector workers.

Temba Nolutshungu, director of the research and lobby group, said on Friday that such a system would bring about black economic empowerment "on a grand scale".

He said it would also help these facilities to keep staff and, if correctly structured, it could even lure some former staff members back from overseas.

He said government could at the same time respond to the criticism that a favoured few were being unjustly enriched by selling shares in hospitals and clinics to interested patients in surrounding "catchment" areas at nominal prices.

The "very large facilities", such as major hospitals, could be split according to their functional divisions and transferred to separate companies to make the operations more manageable.

"The facilities would continue to carry out the same functions, serving largely the same people, under contract to government. Such a process would provide equity in the asset empowerment process between private and public employees, and to surrounding communities," he said.

He noted that the health department's charter required private firms in the sector to rapidly increase the number of black executives and other staff members.

"To fulfil these requirements, the private heath sector firms will have to frantically recruit additional black staff," he said.

"Giving ownership rights to public health sector employees in the facilities in which they are employed will be one way of keeping them."

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