Justin Pearce
WHEN Sister Clara Williams asked two unauthorised visitors to leave the hospital ward, they pressed a knife against her stomach. Dr Hennie Steenkamp has been assaulted four times while treating injured patients. And hospital volunteer Simon Jacobs was stabbed with a pair of scissors when he tried to stop a fight between two inmates.
Williams, Steenkamp and Jacobs — not their real names, as they fear reprisals from their attackers — work in the trauma unit at Cape Town’s Groote Schuur Hospital. A few years ago, their stories of assault would have been unpleasant one-off incidents. Over the past few months, such happenings have become part of the job.
Four weeks ago, a man was fatally stabbed in a fight in the hospital carpark. A week later, an unarmed security guard was knifed in his office by a “visitor” to the hospital.
In the past month, police have been on regular duty on the premises, and the hospital has engaged the services of roving security guards with dogs. Yet staff fear that even these arrangements are insufficient to ensure their safety. They agree that the attacks and threats represent the overflow from the gang battles which flare up in townships such as Manenberg every Friday and Saturday night.
A nursing sister described how a gangster injured in a fight will typically arrive with “escorts” from his own gang — and they will often be followed by members of a rival gang seeking to finish off the injured man. The patients themselves frequently carry guns: “Often the first time we are aware that someone is armed is when the gun shows up on an x-ray,” Steenkamp says.
He describes the recent incidents as “the culmination of a process which has been going on for the past three years”. Attacks have become increasingly common, and are accompanied by a routine of verbal abuse and threats.
“I am not the only doctor to have been assaulted.”
Trauma unit head Dr John Knottenbelt admits that present security arrangements are insufficient to keep armed gangsters out of the hospital.
Before the recent deployment of police and roving guards, the only protection offered to the unit was by two security guards in an office next to the unit’s main entrance. Friends and relatives who bring patients to the unit have to walk past the office to get to the waiting room, and when a crowd arrives it is impossible to separate the bona fide visitors from a gangster entourage. Access to the trauma ward itself is through a swing door which is neither locked nor guarded, leaving it up to the nursing staff to police who comes in and out.
Gangsters will stake out territory at the hospital much as they do on the streets: “One night they brought in an injured gangster, and two back-up cars came full of guys with knives and guns,” recalls a nursing sister. “They parked illegally in the ambulance bay in front, and wouldn’t move.”
The carpark stabbing took place in similar circumstances: members of two gangs arrived, a fight broke out and the victim was stabbed only metres from the operating theatre where he later died.
There is despair in Knottenbelt’s voice as he describes the situation: “In any civilised country a hospital or ambulance is sacrosanct — not even in World War II did they shoot at ambulances. Yet here ambulances get shot at on a regular basis. Ambulance crews have to be armed when they go to fetch patients.”
For staff members who themselves live in the gang-ruled townships of the Cape Flats, the fear goes on after their shift ends. “A lot of staff members who live in those areas are told `I’ll fix you when I get out’,” Knottenbelt says. “They are assaulted out there, and subjected to verbal abuse.”
Work in any trauma unit is a stressful business. At Groote Schuur, the additional threat of assault is causing a severe staffing problem. Doctors only spend a few months in the trauma unit before being transferred to other departments, “otherwise they’d go moggy”, as Knottenbelt puts it. The nursing staff simply leave. “I took over in 1987,” Knottenbelt recalls. “Since then only three or four out of a staff of 30 or 40 still remain. People can’t take it.”