The Western Cape department of health has refused to reinstate the Khayelitsha healthcare workers who were dismissed on June 11 during the public strike, despite high court Judge Siraj Desai’s ruling that healthcare facilities be restored to a functional state.
If an agreement is reached with National Education Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) at the end of the public strike, however, the department will be obliged to reinstate the workers.
The patients, families of patients and the Treatment Action Campaign, who took the matter to the court, had set an ultimatum for the health department to respond by Thursday morning about whether they would implement the high court ruling.
Fatima Hassan of the Aids Law Project, which represented the complainants, said: ”On Tuesday the court found that the reasonable functioning of the healthcare services should be restored.
”Obviously the most speedy way would have been to bring the dismissed workers back. They are the ones with the right experience, expertise and training. We gave them a deadline to tell us what they intended to do.”
As the deadline approached, the department stated that it would not reinstate the workers, saying instead that it had fulfilled its obligation to restore the facility to a reasonably functional state.
However, according to Hassan, the situation at the Site B Khayelitsha Day Hospital – where 30 of the 41 dismissed workers were employed, – remained far from functional, with patients waiting in long queues and a shortage of staff.
In his judgement on Tuesday, Desai found that health service delivery in Khayelitsha had been affected negatively by the health workers’ dismissal – especially since a large number of workers were from the same facility – and that this, in turn, constituted a violation of the constitutional right of patients to access healthcare services.
The Treatment Action Campaign said Desai’s ruling had broader implications.
Nathan Geffen, spokesperson for the TAC, said that the ruling would affect the Western Cape health department’s budget cuts for state hospitals in the province.
”Based on Desai’s ruling, it would be very unconstitutional for the state to go ahead with the budget cuts at major hospitals without making the equivalent services available in some other way,” he said. ”One of our major campaigns going forward is to do with resolving the human resources shortages in the health sector. The judgement will be very useful in the argument that the government has a constitutional duty to ensure that health facilities are adequately staffed.”
The Western Cape department of health declined to comment.