Our national health department’s vision is that of a caring and human society where all South Africans have access to affordable and good quality health care. The reality is we have a long way to go to reach that goal.
This week Special Assignment visits two provinces that are severely affected by poor service delivery in the health care sector. We discover that while Limpopo is battling bureaucracy and a shortage of medical staff, Mpumalanga struggles with poor infrastructure and health workers who disregard patients’ rights.
We spoke to a patient at Lynville in Witbank, Mpumalanga who claims she was badly mistreated at a clinic. She had gone to Lynville Polyclinic to have stitches removed from her wound, only to be given less than adequate treatment by a nurse whose attention was elsewhere – she runs a spaza shop in the consulting room during working hours.
We then visited the deep rural village of Fernie – situated near the Swaziland border in Mpumalanga. A leprosy patient has been without his medication for over three months because the last time he went to hospital, the doctor who treats him didn’t turn up. This means the patient will have to wait until August to get his leprosy medication because it comes from Gauteng only four times a year. In the mean time his condition deteriorates…
In Limpopo we follow the dedicated doctor on his rounds. He’s a registered pediatrician but is employed as a chief medical officer at Donald Fraser Hospital in Thohoyandou. He tells us about the challenges they face on a daily basis because of equipment shortages, about how they frequently have to make tough choices about who lives and who dies.
The South African Human Rights recently released a report on health care, after conducting public hearings in the nine provinces. They concluded that access to health care is still a huge challenge in this country, and that there’s a leadership void in our healthcare sector… people are talking but no one is listening.
Senzeni na? – What have we done? is written and produced by Thuli Nhlapo and was filmed by Dudley Saunders.
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