in Sterkfontein room
Mukoni T Ratshitanga
A WEST RAND mental patient died after being held overnight in a seclusion room during a recent cold snap. Frank de Kock, a long-term patient at Sterkfontein Hospital, was found next morning suffering from exposure and died hours later of pneumonia.
Staff at the hospital are dissatisfied and angry about the lack of official action over the death.
De Kock was admitted to Sterkfontein in 1993 with a diagnosis, according to health authorities, of “mental retardation and epilepsy”. After a spell at Rand West Sanatorium he was returned to Sterkfontein.
Quite how he died remains a mystery. Gauteng’s provincial health department refuses even to disclose De Kock’s age, though it is thought he was in his forties. And details of the death might never have emerged if concerned employees at Sterkfontein had not spoken out.
What is known is that De Kock was put into a seclusion room at the hospital on the night of May 31. Apparently, other patients had been assaulting him and nursing staff put him in there for his own good.
Though nursing staff say they checked on him every half-hour through the night, De Kock was found to be suffering from hypothermia the next morning. He died early on June 1 from pneumonia in nearby Leratong Hospital.
“The cause of death was deemed to be natural,” said provincial mental health director Ruth Zwi this week. “No post-mortem was required.”
Zwi added that De Kock had been a “profoundly handicapped man, always physically frail”.
She said that a full inquiry had been conducted by management at Sterkfontein – the largest state-run mental institution in the province.
But several staff members said that they find it difficult to understand how a patient in the state’s care 24 hours a day could contract pneumonia, and be left untreated to the point where intravenous antibiotics – which he was given at Leratong – could not save him.
They say it is also difficult to understand how, if De Kock was provided with blankets and constantly checked, he was found suffering from exposure. The seclusion room where he was kept, they note, is normally cool. The night of his seclusion was at the height of the cold snap that claimed at least six lives in Gauteng – although these victims were living on the streets.
No one at Sterkfontein, the staff members say, has been called to account for what looks like a preventable tragedy. “Society has an obligation to protect these people,” says one senior staff member.
Other staff members believe many of Sterkfontein’s nurses are not interested in working with mental patients: “They would rather work at an ordinary hospital where they wouldn’t have as many problems.”