Doctors at Johannesburg General hospital allegedly refused to examine a dying paraplegic patient, writes Angella Johnson
A wheelchair-bound teenager died after he was found sitting in his excrement in the emergency waiting room at Johannesburg General hospital.
He had spent four days there waiting to be examined for abdominal and chest pains.
Petrus Ndlovu (19) arrived at the hospital last Wednesday in considerable distress. He was treated for bed sores and then discharged.
He got as far as the waiting room, where he was discovered by friends on Sunday, doubled over in his wheelchair. An hour later, after a doctor allegedly refused to examine him, Ndlovu was dead.
Kevin Daly, who runs a Christian street ministry in Hillbrow, is accusing the hospital and its staff of neglect and gross negligence. He says he found Ndlovu sitting in his own faeces.
“The smell was so overpowering that there was no one else in the waiting room. It was obvious to even the untrained eye that the groaning figure was ill and weak.
“He could not sit up straight in his wheelchair, so we took [him] to ward 165, where a doctor assured us he had already been treated for bed sores and discharged.”
After a lengthy discussion, the doctor admitted Ndlovu had not had an abdominal examination and agreed to re-admit him.
No further assistance was offered, so Daly and a colleague wheeled Ndlovu into an examining room, removed his soiled clothing and lifted him on to the bed.
Within 20 minutes a doctor entered the room, asked a few questions and without once touching Ndlovu, discharged him.
Daly pleaded with another doctor to conduct a proper examination and was told that would place her colleague’s professional integrity in question. But she eventually agreed.
When Daly went to give the good news to Ndlovu, he found him dead.
“I was flooded with emotion,” he recalls. “Those doctors and nurses knew that a young man – a paraplegic – had been there for several days because they had phoned around to get someone to fetch him. Yet they did nothing to help him.”
Dr Pascal Ngakane, the hospital superintendent in charge of casualty, says he received a letter of complaint about the incident and is looking into it. He has asked the head of the emergency ward to collect statements from all the people concerned.
“These are very serious allegations. I’m most surprised to hear this.
“Someone should have spotted him long before, but I cannot make any further comment until I have collected all the facts.”
Daly is demanding to see the results of an autopsy being carried out and has asked the Medical and Dental Council to investigate.
“I don’t think this is an isolated case,” he insists. “Most of the people who get treated this way are poor, displaced and voiceless – people with no one to stand up for them; people for whom no one would look twice if they disappeared.”
Ndlovu was no saint. Typical of Southern Africa’s lost generation – the old regime offered him no real education and the new regime appeared to offer him no real opportunities – he ran away from his home in Zimbabwe about six years ago and turned to crime, until he was stopped by a police bullet in the spine.
Alone and still wanted by the authorities, he lived in squalid conditions in a Hillbrow block of flats frequented by drug dealers – always fearing arrest.
Ironically, on Sunday his father, Ronnie Ndlovu, who works for a family in Randjiesfontein, drove to Johannesburg to look for him.
Ronnie Ndlovu, who had not seen his son since January, said: “Petrus has been in several hospitals, including Baragwanath, since the shooting.
“I thought he had gone back home to his mother, then out of the blue someone called to say he was sick again.”
He went to identify the body at the hospital mortuary this week and doctors explained that his son had suffered a cardiac arrest.
Lawyers for Human Rights believe Ronnie Ndlovu may have grounds to sue the hospital or health authorities for negligence.
“According to the scenario you have put to me, this appears to be a very serious case of a failure to exercise duty of care,” explained Corlett Letlojane.
“By not examining a sick patient, it could be considered that a doctor behaved unethically and dangerously.”