News blues…
When does the right to health care become an empty promise?Excerpts from a letter to SA’s minister of health from concerned citizens regarding the collapse of Eastern Cape’s health care system:
I’m allowing myself to feel optimism. Nestled in that feeling, though, is worry and, yes, guilt. Can I really skip back to my life in California, my family and friends, my houseboat, a short-term job, vaccination against Covid-19… and leave my mother (feeling abandoned) in the Care Center?
While health care is “officially” free to South Africans who cannot afford or do not have access to private health care, the health care system is overwhelmed and, like too many SA institutions and bureaucracies, under-funded with an overall lack of bureaucratic competence.
After paying, yet again, market prices for the gardener to visit a doctor – as opposed to days-long visit to the local, over-whelmed hospital where he’ll run the risk of exposure to Covid-19 (see article, above) – I received a response from the doctor on the letter that accompanied the gardener. Among other things, I’d asked for more information on his illness and what he could and could not eat (given the initial diagnosis of gastro-enteritis).
I received back a note of pablum – a list of aliment that included sebaceous dermatitis and candida - and, tucked in amid that list, a recommendation that he be “tested to rule out retrovirus”. In other words, HIV.
Gulp.
This is a 38-year-old man with stay-at-home wife and two young children.
What happens to them if he has HIV?
It’s a hideous thought.
Feb 26: sunrise 5:47am; sunset 6:33pm.
March 2: sunrise 5:50am; sunset 6:29pm.
March 9: sunrise 5:55am; sunset 6:21pm.
March 18: sunrise 5:00am; sunset 6:11pm.
March 21: sunrise 6:02am; sunset 6:07pm.
March 22: sunrise 6:03am; sunset 6:05pm.
** March 24: sunrise 6:04am; sunset 6:04pm.
When does the right to healthcare become an empty promise, minister? Is it when 66% of patients at a rural hospital die of Covid-19 related illnesses because help doesn’t come in time? Or was it when you discovered they were lying about the true death rate in the province – what doesn’t get reported can’t hurt anyone, right?Read the letter >>
…Premier Oscar Mabuyane defended the wrecking ball that was Health MEC Sindiswa Gomba to the end, saying she did her best – and while this probably is best practice in South African politics it has done nothing to protect the right to healthcare.
…There is a resignation that has set in under the people of the province, that having to deal with the Department of Health has become yet another burden on lives already burdened by poverty, extreme levels of unemployment and crime. The year 2020 added Covid-19 and its brutal death toll to the list. It has pushed a health system teetering on the edge over the cliff.
...Primary healthcare has become a battlefield with pensioners describing their battle to get their chronic medicine as the “survival of the fittest”. Often the cost of transport is the cost of healthcare – and that is not free.
… Mobile clinics are operating without water and electricity – with no stock of antiretrovirals and TB medicine, and with patients having to relieve themselves in the veld or ask residents in nearby homes to use their toilets. When patients line up and wait in vain for a doctor to arrive, they are told that they must try again on another day or write a letter to put in the suggestions box. Patients at district hospitals often don’t get food.
Another patient was recently sexually assaulted by a nurse.
… When will the government say enough is enough?
Emergency medical services remain in crisis. Many hospitals have lost their managers after run-ins with the unions.
At maternity units, exhausted doctors are presented with A4 handwritten lists of more than 20 Caesarean sections that must be done “immediately” because they are life-threatening, but in theatre they have no proper gowns and not a pair of surgical scissors that works. They have to run the theatre for 24 hours a day and due to a shortage of porters, the few specialists left now also fetch and return their own patients.
Nurses must cut open the sleeves of the gowns because they would otherwise not be usable. ... As an act of desperation and with dire staff shortages, as fatally high as 60% in some units, heads of tertiary units in Nelson Mandela Bay were forced to refuse taking in medical students due to start their rotation at the end of the month. …
…The drainage system at Port Elizabeth/Gqeberha’s Provincial Hospital has become infested with superbugs and there is nothing anybody can do as the head office in Bhisho has refused to replace it for the past 10 years.
…When will you intervene? Will it be when someone finally realises that a lot is going wrong in a province that has to pay R920-million in medico-legal claims in a single year? Or will it be when the medical waste company finally refuses to collect medical waste due to non-payment, creating a public hazard? Will it be when you see the open bags of hazardous medical waste lying on the grounds of a hospital?
***
- Tracking Covid-19 vaccinations worldwide
- South African experts to follow for up-to-date and accurate Covid information…
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
Another step closer to Skyping the agency that’s held my return ticket to San Francisco since the pandemic shut down international flights.I’m allowing myself to feel optimism. Nestled in that feeling, though, is worry and, yes, guilt. Can I really skip back to my life in California, my family and friends, my houseboat, a short-term job, vaccination against Covid-19… and leave my mother (feeling abandoned) in the Care Center?
***
Staying with the theme of today’s post – SA failing health care system – a closer look into that system as I try to understand what ails the gardener. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, he’s been ill for more than six weeks: stomach pain, extreme fatigue, aching legs and knees, extreme loss of weight….While health care is “officially” free to South Africans who cannot afford or do not have access to private health care, the health care system is overwhelmed and, like too many SA institutions and bureaucracies, under-funded with an overall lack of bureaucratic competence.
After paying, yet again, market prices for the gardener to visit a doctor – as opposed to days-long visit to the local, over-whelmed hospital where he’ll run the risk of exposure to Covid-19 (see article, above) – I received a response from the doctor on the letter that accompanied the gardener. Among other things, I’d asked for more information on his illness and what he could and could not eat (given the initial diagnosis of gastro-enteritis).
I received back a note of pablum – a list of aliment that included sebaceous dermatitis and candida - and, tucked in amid that list, a recommendation that he be “tested to rule out retrovirus”. In other words, HIV.
Gulp.
This is a 38-year-old man with stay-at-home wife and two young children.
What happens to them if he has HIV?
It’s a hideous thought.
***
While today is not the officially recognized equinox - day and night of equal duration –but it is that day.** Feb 26: sunrise 5:47am; sunset 6:33pm.
March 2: sunrise 5:50am; sunset 6:29pm.
March 9: sunrise 5:55am; sunset 6:21pm.
March 18: sunrise 5:00am; sunset 6:11pm.
March 21: sunrise 6:02am; sunset 6:07pm.
March 22: sunrise 6:03am; sunset 6:05pm.
** March 24: sunrise 6:04am; sunset 6:04pm.
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