Doctors studying to be heart surgeons can no longer be trained at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital because it has lost its accreditation to train registrars in cardiothoracic surgery.

This means that the Steve Biko Academic Hospital in Pretoria is the only hospital in Gauteng that can train doctors to become heart surgeons, a speciality that can take up to seven years to acquire.

Private hospitals, with better equipment, are barred by law from training registrars to become heart surgeons.

Dean of the Wits Medical School, Professor Martin Veller, said the Health Professions Council of SA told staff this week that the hospital had lost its accreditation.

He said the council still had to give reasons as to why the hospital was not meeting the council's standards to train thoracic surgeons.

The council and the Gauteng health department did not comment at the time of going to press.

Veller said the hospital would respond once the council had given it more details.

He said it was not true that the doctors who trained registrars spent too much time in private practice instead working in government hospitals.

An insider said broken equipment, a shortage of hi-tech equipment and a lack of ICU beds for patients had affected how much training was on offer.

Currently, not all intensive care nursing posts are filled, preventing the hospital from expanding its ICU unit. There is also a shortage of beds for the unit.

Machinery is often not fixed as suppliers are not paid on time.

The Times reported last week that R53-million of the hospital's R80-million equipment budget in the 2013-2104 financial year was withheld by the department of health and orders by department heads for diagnostic equipment were not signed off.

Another doctor said there were too few surgeons employed to train registrars, putting them under tremendous pressure.

"The DA said it is a shame that one of the only two academic Gauteng hospitals has lost its accreditation. Doctors have been warning about this and nobody listens," the doctor said.

He said the next department to lose its accreditation would be anaesthesiology.

The department at the Johannesburg Hospital has been short of 10 fulltime anaesthetists for more than a year.

Anaesthetists have been training registrars after hours as they are too busy operating during daytime.