Our report

Access to quality healthcare is a basic human right and fundamental to social and environmental sustainability. It is the basis for selfactualisation and the foundation for progress.

Netcare is a values-driven organisation that understands the importance of service leadership, engagement, listening, learning and partnership in fulfilling its purpose to help care for the health of humankind.

Scope of the report

Our annual integrated report for the year ended 30 September 2011 details our efforts to act on our commitment to society, while also indicating why we believe Netcare’s strategy is sound and will enable us to create value for our stakeholders into the future.

Framed within the longer-term intent of our strategy and expectations for the future, our report reviews our value contribution to all our stakeholders, including our social, operational, financial and environmental performance. As such, it aims to cater for a broad stakeholder readership, while also providing the information that shareholders have traditionally required. We hesitate to call this our first integrated report as our reports in the past have attempted to assess our performance from considerably broader than just a financial and operational perspective. So while we have attempted to provide comprehensive data and commentary that clearly links our strategy to our value drivers and assesses our performance in the context of our material issues, the components of this year’s report remain largely the same. Given the distinct differences in the business structure and material issues in each of our geographies, the structural improvements we have made are mainly to be found in the operational reviews, which aim to consolidate all the relevant reports pertaining to each operation.

We will continue to improve our reporting in the year ahead, specifically in defining integrated performance indicators and targets, with the aim of providing the information necessary for our stakeholders to make informed choices about our ability to create and sustain value into the future.

Our report covers all our operating subsidiaries and joint ventures in SA and the UK, unless otherwise stated. An overview of our Public Private Partnerships is also provided.

We have endeavoured to prepare our report in accordance with all applicable reporting requirements, including those of the South African Companies Act No 71 of 2008, the Listing Requirements of the JSE Limited and the King Report on Governance for South Africa (King III). We have also considered the guidelines contained in the discussion paper of the Integrated Reporting Committee issued in January this year. The annual financial statements are prepared according to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

In determining the content of the annual integrated report, we aimed to provide comprehensive and material disclosure to serve the needs of all our stakeholders.

Assurance

We acknowledge that we have much work to do in implementing the combined assurance model envisaged in King III, and specific attention will be given to this in the year ahead. A combined assurance model has been developed by Group Internal Audit that can be applied to major risks indentified. The proposed model has been considered by the Audit Committee and will be implemented by Group Internal Audit in 2012. Thereafter, the intention is to move towards external assurance of the full report.

The opinion of the Group’s external auditors, Grant Thornton, on our annual financial statements can be found on page 133.