OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 5.45am.
GAUTENG’s health services are on the verge of collapse, and intensive-care patients will begin to die unnecessarily if a freeze on hiring new doctors at Johannesburg’s four teaching hospitals is not reversed by month’s end.
That was the sobering message of a panel of four senior state-employed doctors, who called a press conference on Monday afternoon to warn that the situation is now a crisis.
New appointments at the four hospitals — Chris Hani Baragwanath, Johannesburg General, Coronationville and Helen Joseph — have been frozen for months as a result of continuing budget cuts. Professor Ken Huddle, chairman of Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital’s Medical Advisory Committee, warned that at the end of June many posts will be left empty as a result of normal rotations and expiry of contracts, which will lead to crippling failures in services to those in need of medical treatment. “We are not here to whinge and moan. We are not here to get more for ourselves. We are here because we are now unable to provide services to the very needy population in Greater Johannesburg,” said Huddle.
His sentiments were echoed by Professor John Pettifor, head of child care at Chris Hani Baragwanath, who said that 10 empty posts in the hospital’s neo-natal intensive care unit mean the unit can no longer operate. “We treat 500 newborn babies a year,” said Pettifor. “With the moratorium, the vast majority of these children will now die because they will not get ventilatory support.”
Chris Hani Baragwanath’s intensive care director Dr Rudo Mathivha said: “We are talking about survival of the fittest here. Only the strongest will survive.” She added that both children and adults will die of conditions which should be reversible. Fewer than half of the 3362 nursing posts at the hospital are filled at present.
Helen Joseph hospital academic head of radiology Dr Elaine Joseph told the conference that shortage of staff and money has already led to equipment not being repaired and resulting deaths.
Professor Max Price, dean of health sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, warned that Chris Hani Baragwanath’s paediatric services, including intensive care and its world-leading paediatric burns unit, are the only affordable emergency and tertiary care and ventilatory support for newborns and sick babies available to Soweto’s four million people. “This will be a tragic situation in the largest paediatric department in the country, perhaps the continent, which receives referrals from the four surrounding provinces and other countries,” he said.