Various provincial hospitals and clinics in the Eastern Cape are not providing proper service delivery. The main reason for this is that staff members are refusing to work because they have not received compensation for working overtime and there is a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE).
In the Livingstone Hospital in Port Elizabeth, there are several units that are not functioning at all and plastic bags filled with waste materials are accumulating in the passages. Bedlinen is not being washed either.
Important clinics, like the Motherwell Community Health Centre, have already closed their doors due to a lack of PPE. As a result, seriously ill patients are being turned away.
At the Cecilia Makiwane Hospital, three units were closed after staff members working there contracted the Covid-19 virus.
The FF Plus in the Eastern Cape expects the MEC for Health, Sindiswa Gomba, to accept responsibility for the poor conditions at provincial hospitals and clinics and want her to see to it that the problems are rectified, specifically because the virus is spreading at a rapid rate in the province. At present, the province is not ready to deal with the expected spread.
The FF Plus considers the procurement of a hundred medical emergency motorbikes to reach patients in rural areas as proof of the MEC's inability to do proper crisis management.
Although procuring motorbikes to reach patients can be justified, purchasing a hundred is less easily justifiable. The MEC should rather have addressed the aforementioned problems first. The dispute about overtime should also have been resolved.
It is pointless to fetch patients from remote places just to bring them to the hospitals and clinics in the province that are not functioning properly.
In light of the dysfunctional Department of Health and an MEC who is not capable of effectively managing the current pandemic, the FF Plus demands that the MEC must be replaced.
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