Two news reports from opposite ends of Nelson Mandela Bay this week tell one tale — nothing changes in the Eastern Cape health department.
At the NU2 clinic in Motherwell on Monday, patients were so desperate to receive proper healthcare services that they shut the gates in protest after being turned away.
Some described how they were forced to share life-saving medication.
Nomandla Masebe said patients often had to leave the clinic without being attended to, despite having to pay people to escort them there at 3am to start queuing.
These are not new stories.
This newspaper reported recently on clinics in the Bay that were turning away patients because of staff shortages, and on desperate patients who had queued before dawn, only to be denied their medication.
Such accounts are published over and over, year after year, with only the names of the clinics and the faces of the patients changing.
At Dora Nginza Hospital on Monday, nurses and support staff abandoned their posts in a wildcat strike over five months of unpaid overtime.
They left their patients in crowded corridors without food or medication.
Nehawu regional chair Tebogo Goniwe told patients in the casualty ward that workers were abandoning their posts.
“They only paid doctors. That means that our work here is not important. Therefore, those doctors must be the ones to see to your care.”
The health department’s response? Familiar statements that there are no medication stockouts at public health facilities in the city (though officials admitted to staff shortages) and promises that overtime payments will be made.
Task teams will be established, monitoring will be improved and new interventions will be explored.
The same old response while queues outside clinics grow longer and staff become more desperate.
This is not a system in crisis. It is a system in collapse.
Officials charged with fixing it are quick to explain away the failures, but slow to act with urgency.
The result is predictable. Nothing changes and nothing will change until the department confronts its own dysfunction and is held accountable.
We have said it before and do so again: Patients must be at the centre of the health system, and the department must recognise that exhausted staff cannot provide care on empty promises.
The Herald
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