Price of a consultation at a GP

Finding affordable healthcare in South Africa is possible, but it comes with its own challenges. Patients often wait for hours to be assisted, and fatigued doctors sometimes miss underlying conditions.

“Private healthcare is generally regarded as being good, while the public healthcare is regarded as being in decline even though the majority of citizens rely on this service,” says Vaughn Harrison, a partner at Hogan Lovells with 25 years’ legal experience in the healthcare industry.

He adds that this is despite the high percentage of funding that’s being allocated towards public healthcare. If South Africans decided to skip the queues at local clinics, how much would they have to pay for a visit to a general practitioner?

Justmoney contacted 13 doctors in Cape Town to help answer this question. We also found out how medical schemes assist with these costs, and we compared South Africa with its BRICS counterparts.

On average, South Africans can expect to pay R565 for a doctor’s visit.

Have a look at the below table to see how much you’d have to pay for a single appointment:

Note that a single doctor was contacted in each area and that these numbers do not reflect the ultimate cost of visiting a doctor in these suburbs.

However, based on the above table, doctors closer to the centre of Cape Town charged more for consultations.

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