Irreparable harm had been caused by dismissing health workers in Khayelitsha clinics during the public-service strike, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) argued in the Cape High Court on Thursday.
Last week, the TAC and seven Khayelitsha residents lodged an urgent application to reverse the dismissal of 41 striking Western Cape health workers.
On Thursday, the applicants’ advocate, Peter Hodes, told the court the dismissals infringed on the constitutional rights of patients to health services, life and dignity.
Hodes referred Judge Siraj Desai to the affidavits of Dr Srinisivasan Govender and Dr Eric Goemaere, both working at clinics in Khayelitsha.
According to Govender, the summary dismissals meant that even if the strike ended, the Khayelitsha clinics would not be able to provide sustainable emergency services; care for chronic, mental and acute illnesses; or serve children and pregnant women.
Goemaere, head of Médecins sans Frontières in South Africa, said HIV-positive patients whose treatment is interrupted could become ill and die.
Hodes told a packed courtroom — including TAC chairperson Zackie Achmat and TAC supporters — that not one of the dismissed workers had committed any of the offences the provincal health department had set out as grounds for dismissal.
These, he said, included intimidating colleagues who wanted to work or patients trying to enter a health facility; threatening or attacking non-striking workers; and visiting working colleagues at their homes and threatening them.
Hodes said the respondents — Western Cape health minister Pierre Uys, national Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and Public Service and Administration Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi — ”have non-suited themselves by failing to file any affidavits at all”.
When Hodes referred to an affidavit filed by a nurse at a clinic in Khayelitsha, Desai stopped him to ask if it was a mistake that the nurse — employed at the clinic since 1990 — was only earning R2 500.
”That’s what the strike’s about,” Hodes said.
He emphasised that the province was using the public-service strike a ”pretext” for the dismissals, and that the TAC’s application did not concern the legality of the strike itself.
The case continued on Thursday afternoon. — Sapa