The importance of access to adequate primary healthcare facilities in a poor and vast province such as the Eastern Cape has long been recognised by pioneers of community health programmes.
One of this country’s foremost community health pioneers was Dr Trudy Thomas, whose work in this area spanned half a century.
She recognised that if the state created a decent primary health sector serving rural and urban communities, it could contribute to disease prevention, health promotion, and chronic and other treatment.
Through her mentorship and hard work during the apartheid years, excellent primary healthcare clinics were dotted throughout areas such as the old Ciskei.
Many years later, Thomas became health MEC in the Eastern Cape in the 1990s. But, even then, she found her ideas and vision for primary health care frustrated by funding deficits and bureaucracy.
She believed well-run clinics should provide health education, effective immunisation programmes, antenatal and postnatal care, family planning, treatment of common illnesses, HIV testing and antiretroviral treatment, tuberculosis screening, chronic disease management, and general child health services.
It is a vision that the World Health Organisation has picked up on and applied throughout developing countries.
Where successful, it has lowered overall healthcare expenditure and taken enormous pressure off district and regional hospitals.
But here in the Eastern Cape, the provincial government has allowed clinics to become dilapidated and barely fit for purpose.
They are all too often poorly managed, understaffed, underequipped and experience shortages of vaccines and medication.
Dispatch investigations have exposed overcrowding, long waiting times and early daily closure of rundown clinics throughout the Buffalo City Metro.
People desperate for medical help are all too often turned away.
The elderly, children and the chronically ill are the ones that suffer from provincial neglect.
For most, the long fruitless wait in icy conditions makes them sicker than when they arrive at clinics. They are robbed not just of their right to adequate basic health care but also to their right to respect and dignity.
Premier Oscar Mabuyane has expressed shock and has promised to intervene.
Almost every community, rural or urban, across the Eastern Cape has similar experiences to that which is happening across BCM.
Clinics are vital to primary health care. They are supposed to bring health support closer to communities.
Mabuyane should make it his personal mission to pick up where Thomas left off and ensure that staffing is strengthened, clinic infrastructure improved and maintained, and medical and other supplies are made secure and predictable.
Let’s hope he makes good on his promise to intervene, not just in BCM but across the province.
