Strike: TB patients sent home
2010-08-31 19:10
Cape Town - Patients from three Eastern Cape tuberculosis (TB) hospitals have been sent home because of the effects of the public service strike, the province's health department said on Tuesday.
Spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo said two department staff members, one of them a trainee nurse, were arrested in Mthatha on Tuesday for intimidating and assaulting non strikers.
He said the department had to temporarily discharge patients from Port Elizabeth's Jose Pearson and East London's Fort Grey TB hospitals, both of which housed multiple and extremely drug resistant patients, because there were no nurses to look after them.
Striking staff had frustrated attempts to bring in temporary workers.
Patients had also been sent home from Mdantsane's Nkqubela Hospital, where routine TB was treated.
Kupelo said the patients had been given a "two week pass" to go home, and that the department had engaged NGOs to continue their treatment there.
"We want to reassure communities and family members that these people are not contagious at all," Kupelo said. "They have been tested."
The only patients still at the hospitals were a few who were terminally ill.
Though he could not give a total for those sent home, the number was over 140 for the East London hospitals alone.
Hangover effect
Kupelo said that, also as a result of striking staff shortages, three patients had absconded from Komani Psychiatric Hospital in Queenstown.
On Tuesday morning, staff at Tower Psychiatric Hospital in Fort Beaufort were ejected from the premises by strikers, and there were now "no workers at the hospital".
The department encouraged people who had relatives at Tower to visit them.
He said it also urged all those who had family at any hospital in the province to do the same, on a daily basis, while the strike was on.
Kupelo warned that the strike would continue to have an effect on the province's health services even after it ended.
The administration of the department had ground to a halt, and there was now a massive backlog in payments to service providers.
Some service providers might be tempted to suspend those services, but the department pleaded with them to give it time to get things on track again.
There was also likely to be a hangover effect in the distribution of drugs, as there was a massive backlog there too.
He said the number of deaths attributable to the strike rose to six on Monday when ambulance services failed to respond to a call to pick up a pregnant woman in the Hewu district.
She eventually got private transport first to Queenstown, then went to East London's Frere Hospital, where her child was delivered stillborn.
- SAPA