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The Special
Assignment team visited a paramedic on duty in remote Lusikisiki,
in the north-eastern
Cape. But he didn’t even have an
ambulance. It had been involved in an accident and there was no
replacement vehicle. Emergencies had to be handled by an
ambulance from Mt Ayliff, 100 km away.
“We are a joke”, he says
“…I am prepared to save your
life, but I don’t have equipment… how can we help our
community?”
Ambulance workers say they’re tired of
appealing to the Eastern Cape Health Department, which pays out
hundreds of thousands of rands to private ambulance contractors
for medical rescue choppers and a fixed wing plane. But records
show that politicians use the aircraft more than patients do.
The Public Service Accountability Monitor, based in Grahamstown,
reveals that between February and April this year, the aircraft
made 19 trips within the province at a cost of R350-thousand.
“But only nine of those trips were related to medical issues,”
says the PSAM’s Dr Neil Overy. “MEC’s
have their own budgets for transport through their own
departments, so in effect the emergency medical service is
subsidising them.”
Complaints about the
EMS are equally
vociferous in the Northern Cape. We met a heartbroken father who
described how his 19-year-old daughter died after being picked
up by an ambulance that had no oxygen. Even after oxygen was
eventually obtained, there was no trained staff in the back of
the ambulance to administer it.
“The doctor later said she hadn’t received enough oxygen… there
was nobody in the back of the ambulance who could give
treatment… my other daughter, who was also seriously injured,
had to look after her younger sister”,
said an Upington resident.
A former paramedic in the
Northern Cape
told Special Assignment there was no advanced ambulance training
anymore and that there weren’t enough staff to work in teams.
“So you are alone. You have to ‘scoop and go’ as they say. Load
up and leave. You can’t sit behind and treat someone.”
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