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SA's healthcare headache

I INITIALLY started paying attention to South Africa’s government hospitals after my daughter was born 11 years ago at a Mediclinic, one of a chain of South Africa’s well-run private hospitals.

At the time, the care and precision at the hospital was remarkable. However, being admitted to a private hospital is a treat not many South Africans are able to afford.

A recent rant by an elderly relative about bad service at one of Gauteng’s public hospitals and comments comparing the new dispensation with the old, got me thinking.

The government and the ANC had better be careful because the apartheid rulers’ expertise when it comes to running hospitals is a topic that often comes up when black people talk about their current experiences in these places.

My relative was admitted for high blood pressure. He says the hospital did not have pyjamas for the newly-admitted patients, forcing them to brave cold weather without even hospital blankets. There were heaters, but they were not working.

The relative also accused the nurses of being rude to the patients and in most cases he alleged they were highly incompetent. He said the doctors that were available could not speak English and it was hard for patients to communicate with them.

It gets worse. The hospital allegedly ran out of certain critical medication and according to the relative, patients were advised to buy medication themselves.

“This was not the case during the rule of the Boers. Hospitals were clean with lots of medicine, let alone competent doctors that were on call all the time,” the relative remarked, adding that he had been hospitalised many times during the apartheid era.

My relative’s experience at the Gauteng hospital basically means the healthcare South Africa’s lower-income people receive is not only challenging but can also occasionally be deadly. In the four-odd days my relative was there, one or two (he wasn't sure) people in his ward died.

What exactly is the problem here?

The government's failure to invest massively in the public healthcare sector in the face of increased demand over the past decade-and-a-half has become the biggest hindrance to managing a well-organised healthcare system for the country's needy.

Why is the South African government failing to invest in public healthcare?

With such widespread corruption, one can easily assume that the money has been pocketed  by some crooks in the government.

During his 2015 budget speech, Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene said health spending would reach R178bn by 2017/18.

This is a lot of money that could be used for stocking up on medication and other critical hospital amenities. But I do not think this will help at all, at least under this government.

A great deal of money has already been pumped into healthcare since 1994. But it has not delivered any improvement in the facilities.

It appears that most government strategies around healthcare are just that - political posturing. They are certainly not providing long-lasting answers to South Africa’s healthcare miseries.

South Africa is slowly edging closely towards a state where people are denied healthcare because there is a lack of medication among other things. God forbid.

*Mzwandile Jacks is an independent journalist. Opinions expressed are his own.


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