Patients, doctors, nurses, workers and student nurses who spoke to the Dispatch investigation team, all describe their working conditions and their treatment at the hands of hospital managers as unbearable and even foul.
DispatchLIVE saw shocking scenes of patients in plaster casts sleeping on floors and benches in the Mthatha General Hospital waiting area.
Simphiwe Tshitshi of Pola Park, one of many patients crammed into the waiting area, said he was spending his seventh night on the floor since he had arrived.
“They do take care of us. They refill our drips and give us food, but they say there are no beds for us,” he said.
His experience is not unique. Patients at many hospitals in the province endure terrible conditions, DispatchLIVE discovered.
Over 30 days of investigation we discovered:
- Patients, many with limbs in plaster casts, lying on tables, floors and benches, waiting to be transferred to other hospitals;
- Patients spending up to three days in hospital but without a bed;
- Broken windows filled with cardboard in wards;
- Patients using their own blankets;
- Patients wearing threadbare gowns, some too big, others tiny and without buttons;
- Student nurses living in squalor;
- Doctors and senior nurses living in substandard houses; and
- Long queues everywhere.
General workers and skilled artisans, such as electricians, said they did not get support from management.
Sources are not being named to protect them from victimisation.
A laundry worker at Canzibe Hospital in Ngqeleni said they were reduced to pulping Sunlight soap and boiling it before doing the laundry.
“We do not have washing powder. It has been like this for quite some time,” said the worker.
An electrician said the hospital he was in charge of, was so run down he had to live there, in dreadful conditions, to be ready for the regular power failure emergencies.
“I cannot live far from the hospital because whenever there is a problem with the electricity, I must be available immediately,” he said.
A doctor said they worked under tremendous strain.
“We only do what we can. The work is way beyond us,” the doctor said.
He and his colleagues treat hundreds of patients who flock to the hospital with a full gamut of problems from serious injuries to chronic illness.
“After doing ward rounds, only two of us are responsible for all the patients in the outpatient department,” he said.
A patient at Holy Cross Hospital in Flagstaff said she had abandoned the hospital after waiting two days without being attended to.
“All they did was take my blood pressure and weight. Now we are told we will be attended to the following day. It is better to die at home that dying here waiting for treatment which may never happen.”
At Hewu Hospital, DispatchLIVE saw five patients lying in their own blankets.
A nurse said she was leaving the Eastern Cape hospital scene. “I cannot carry on working as a slave,” she said.
We found that student nurses live in squalor.
Dozens of students from Lilitha Nursing College at Frontier Hospital live with blocked toilets and broken windows. Male and female students share bathrooms.
Bhisho legislature's health portfolio committee chair and ANC MPL Mxolisi Dimaza said that beside budget constraints, some problems were as a result of poor management.
“One of the serious problems we have noticed as a health portfolio committee is that lots of money in the health department goes to settle medico-legal cases, which are a result of a shortage of staff,” he said.
“In some hospitals the problems are caused by managers who cannot do their jobs. It is just a matter of poor management and staff who do not care,” he said.
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