Conditions in some Gauteng state hospitals pose a serious health risk to patients, Beeld newspaper reported on Thursday.
It said this emerged from recent complaints by readers.
They spoke of cockroaches in hospital kitchens, dirty toilets, faeces on the walls and of incompetent nurses who treated wounds without gloves.
Fred Berry (65) the father of Debra Venter (29) from Primrose on the East Rand, had to undergo emergency surgery at the Tambo Memorial Hospital earlier this month as a result of sepsis.
The sepsis set in after nurses apparently touched an open wound with their bare hands and allegedly let him to lie in his own blood and urine.
According to Berry, he had undergone stomach surgery in April.
”When we asked them [the nurses] to change the sheets, they said it was not their job and that I was forward.”
Debra Venter said she had asked a nurse for a basin so that her father could brush his teeth. According to Venter, the nurses suggested she rinse one of the [full] bedpans for the purpose.
When Venter asked them to dress the wound, they said they would do so ”when they felt like it”.
On May 3, the wound ruptured and Berry’s intestines then protruded from his stomach.
”When I got to my father, he was nearly dying and battling to breathe.”
The nurses refused to call a doctor and Venter’s husband, Leon, supplied Berry with oxygen.
Shortly afterwards a nurse apparently tried to push Berry’s intestines back into the wound.
”She didn’t even wash her hands beforehand.”
Venter ran down the corridor in search of a doctor, who immediately arranged emergency surgery.
Berry remained on a ventilator in the hospital’s high-care unit until Tuesday.
At least two other readers provided Beeld with cellphone photographs and video material of the unsanitary conditions in the Tshwane District Hospital and One Military Hospital in Pretoria earlier this month.
Photographs taken at the first hospital showed faeces and urine on the floors and walls and an empty liquor bottle in a blocked toilet.
Carel Stander, a visitor to One Military Hospital, sent a cellphone video of cockroaches crawling against a wall of a kitchen next to a ward.
Gauteng health department spokesperson Zanele Mngadi said the incident at Tambo Memorial Hospital was being investigated. – Sapa