Internship & community service posts, by the numbers

National totals

In 2010, 2 884 of the 3 053 accredited posts were actually funded, and 2 599 interns were in post — 90% of funded posts and 85% of accredited ones. The gap between what a hospital is accredited to train and what the province pays for is the number worth watching.

By province

Internship posts concentrate in the big tertiary complexes, so Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal dominate. Community service is the mirror image: it is spread thinly across hundreds of district hospitals, community health centres and clinics, and most of those sites carry just one or two posts.

Biggest internship sites (2024)

What changed since 2010

Because the two annexures count different things, we do not publish per-hospital deltas between them. What is directly comparable is which hospitals appear at all — a facility that trained interns in 2010 and is absent from the 2024 allocation has stopped, and vice versa. Hospitals whose 2010 posts were reported inside a complex total are excluded from both lists, since their absence under their own name proves nothing.

Placement routes that aren’t a hospital

Community service is not only hospital work. The 2024 allocation also funds posts at district health offices, at NHLS pathology laboratories attached to university departments, and in the South African Military Health Service — which is a different employer and a different application route. These rarely appear in anyone’s directory, so they are easy to miss when you rank your five choices.

The district-office posts are concentrated in Gauteng’s metros and in North West, where sub-district offices carry posts between them. A community-service doctor based at a district office supports primary-care clinics across a sub-district rather than working from one hospital.

14 of these sites (35 posts) have no page in our directory yet. They are still counted in every total on this page.

Where these numbers come from

• Annexure A to National Assembly written reply NW3249: 2024 Annual Cycle post allocationsNational Department of Health, via Parliamentary Monitoring Group · 2023-10-26 · PMG reply NW3249, 2024 cycle
• Accredited Hospital/Facility for Internship Training (Table 3A)Parliamentary Monitoring Group · 2010-11-04 · PMG Accredited Hospital/Facility for Internship Training (Table 3A), 2010 cycle

Each figure is transcribed from the published annexure and checked against that document’s own grand totals before it is used. Where an annexure reports one total for a hospital complex we keep it at complex level rather than dividing it between the hospitals, because a split figure would be a number nobody published. Allocations are re-set every cycle, so treat these as the published record rather than as this cycle’s vacancies — the ICSP portal is binding. Data last rebuilt 2026-08-27. Full method on our sources page.