Half a mil – for an amputated penis

If you live in the North West and are not a healthy person, the Bophelong Hospital in Mafikeng is the last place you should go.

The provincial department of health paid R1,7-million in the past financial year to eight patients who suffered from injuries caused by the negligence of doctors and hospital staff.

Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang released this information in a written response to a question by Democratic Alliance MP Gareth Morgan about claims of negligence at state hospitals.

North West, Northern Cape and the Western Cape are the only provinces covered in her response.

Her spokesperson, Sibani Mngadi, says details on the other six provinces are still outstanding. ‘We will resubmit all the details when they become available.”

The statistics show that the North West spent R10,9-million on claims last year and the Western Cape R742 000. The Northern Cape department of health, Tshabalala-Msimang says, made no payments during 2005/06.

DA spokesperson on health Mike Waters says he is ‘appalled at the extent to which patients in public hospitals are dying, being disabled or suffering enormously as a result of negligence by health workers”.

The largest single payment made was R5,2-million to a couple whose child suffered from cerebral palsy after a ‘delay in attending [to] a patient in labour”. This happened in 1997 at the Bodibe Clinic near Lichtenburg.

At the Bophelong Hospital, a failed sterilisation led to an unwanted baby (R50 000); an ‘unmonitored” psychiatric patient jumped out of a hospital window and ‘sustained fractured fumer [sic] and dislocated elbow” (R80 000); the failure to refer a patient to a urologist ‘resulting in him suffering from importance [sic] and penis being amputated” (R465 000); and a ‘client” who was ‘attached” [sic] by a psychiatric patient (injuries unknown) was paid R667 000.

Two babies were swapped after birth at the Brits Hospital (R240 000) and the body of a stillborn baby went missing from the mortuary of the Gelukspan Hospital, near Mafikeng (R40 000).

But, says Tshabalala-Msimang, these cases of negligence represent the ‘rare exception to the usually excellent medical care” in public hospitals.

Waters disagrees. ‘The recent publicity over the unnecessary deaths of many babies at Frere Hospital [in the Eastern Cape] highlighted various problems around staff shortages, poor maintenance and dilapidated facilities at this particular hospital, but this reply indicates that hospitals across the country are suffering from many of the same problems, with often tragic consequences for the patients who use them.

Waters is critical of the fact that the statistics for only three provinces were available.

‘Does the department not have information about the rest of the country? If so, how then can the minister of health make the sweeping claim [also in this reply] that these cases are ‘the rare exception to the usually excellent medical care’? If the department is unable to obtain basic information from the provinces … it is a serious indictment on the health minister’s control over provincial administrations.”