A toddler suffering from a lung infection died after nurses at a Bloemfontein hospital told his mother to take him home as they were preparing for a strike, Die Volksblad reported on Thursday.
After spending the whole of last week by her son’s bedside, Joyce Ditsoane boarded a taxi for a 45km ride home when nurses told her there would be no one to take care of the boy on Wednesday.
But on arrival at their home at farm Lima near Tweespruit in the Free State, 13-month-old Mogalema died in his mother’s arms, leaving the family ”raw and bitter”.
”I am hurt and angry. If they [the hospital] had looked after him, he would still be alive,” Ditsoane told the paper.
The boy’s granny, Clementine, agreed that he would not have died if he had been admitted, and said she was furious at the hospital.
A farmer who knows the family well said it was a disgrace. ”This is an innocent child who has died.”
Little Mogalema’s death was not the only one blamed on the public-sector strike.
On Monday, the South African Press Association (Sapa) was told that a KwaZulu-Natal woman lost her unborn baby boy after being told that there were no ambulances available to transport her to hospital on Sunday evening.
The 19-year-old woman’s mother, Busi Dlamini, called an emergency number when she started having a fit.
But Dlamini was told ”there were no workers and there was nobody at the hospitals” when she called the emergency number.
After keeping watch over her eight month pregnant daughter, Thabile Mthembu, at their home in Illovo township on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast, Dlamini sent an SMS to her employer, Gill Slaughter, on Monday morning.
But Slaughter was also told ”there wasn’t anything we can do” when she called 10177, an emergency ambulance number.
She was told to rather call ER24 or Netcare and an ambulance finally arrived at 7am, 12 hours after Dlamini’s call to 112.
Netcare 911 spokesperson Chris Botha said they were given instructions to take Mthembu to Durban’s Addington Hospital, but her deteriorating condition caused them to stop at Kingsway Hospital to stabilise her.
It was there that a doctor discovered that the unborn baby’s heart had stopped beating.
The Red Cross helicopter was called to airlift Mthembu to Addington Hospital as there were no intensive care unit beds available at Kingsway Hospital.
But moments before the helicopter was due to take off the crew were informed that they were not allowed to land at Addington.
They were apparently informed that there was a ”staffing problem”.
Mthembu was then taken to the St Augustine Hospital where doctors spent most of Monday trying to stabilise her before performing a Caesarian section.
Her distraught mother, Dlamini, told Sapa that the strike was ”horrible”.
”It’s very bad. We could not find any support. I don’t know what I can say.”
It is believed that Mthembu’s fits had been caused by a condition known as pre-eclampsia — a disorder that is characterised by high blood pressure and the presence of protein in the urine.
Staff from provincial the Emergency Medical Rescue Service in the Durban area downed tools over the apparent inability of the government to ensure their safety. Since then all ambulance calls have been handled by the smaller private ambulance services such as Netcare 911 and ER24. – Sapa