The Cape High Court has ordered the Western Cape government to ensure that health services in Cape Town’s Khayelitsha area are fully reinstated with immediate effect.
Handing down judgement in a Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) application for the reinstatement of 41 sacked Khayelitsha health workers on Tuesday, Judge Siraj Desai said the court was not the right forum to rule on their dismissal.
”The dismissed employees have not brought an application for reinstatement in this court … and the TAC has no authority to act on their behalf,” he said.
The employees should follow proper procedures and take their grievances to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) or the Labour Court, Desai said. He could only rule on the effect their dismissal had on patients.
The irreparable harm that could be caused to patients where these dismissed employees worked could not be ignored, Desai said.
Health services had been severely curtailed as a result of the dismissals.
”The respondents should restore and guarantee the provision of reasonable functioning health services in Khayelitsha, including emergency, chronic, child and reproductive health services.”
The order was an interim interdict pending the Western Cape department of health’s next appearance in court on August 20.
The department was ordered to pay costs.
The TAC and a group of Khayelitsha residents, some of them HIV-positive, were seeking the reinstatement of the workers fired on June 11 after allegedly participating in the public-service strike.
They contended that the dismissals infringed on the constitutional rights of patients to health services and to life and dignity.
Thirty of the dismissed strikers were from one facility, the Site B Day Hospital, where they constituted almost half the staff.
One in three pregnant women in Khayelitsha is HIV-positive.
Welcoming the judgement, the TAC said the order was an important victory for the people in Khayelitsha.
”This is because the court has found that the respondents acted unconstitutionally and unlawfully by acting without a contingency plan — in other words, they dismissed workers without a contingency plan leading to a disruption of health services in Khayelitsha,” the organisation said in a statement. — Sapa