Shadley Nash
HEALTH services in the Eastern Cape are on the brink of collapse with reports of corpses rotting in mortuaries, hospitals operating without water and medicine shortages.
Water shortages in rural Transkei will compound the region’s health crisis with the regional government appealing to the Department of Water Affairs to intervene.
CPA’s regional health director, Dr Pat Naidoo, has confirmed that hospitals, particularly in rural Transkei and Ciskei, are functioning with erratic or no water supplies.
“You cannot talk about primary health care unless people have access to clean drinking water,” said Dr Siphiwo Stamper of the Eastern Cape health department.
Some villagers at Kanra Poort have died of diarrhoea after drinking impure water.
Naidoo said the medicine shortage is a result of a battle between the CPA’s Western and Eastern Cape regional offices over the control of medicine stores in Port Elizabeth. He said the region’s medicine supply was being run from Cape Town and added that theft of medicines, particularly from health centres in rural Transkei and Ciskei, was adding to the problem.
Most shocking, though, are reports of corpses decaying at the Elliotdale Hospital morgue. The situation has been blamed on the failure of the Eastern Cape government to upgrade the hospital and to pay a local funeral director.
Eastern Cape Attorney General Les Roberts has reportedly said that a number of district surgeons are being investigated for allegedly submitting inflated claims.