The Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Northern Cape has called on the provincial health department to develop a turnaround plan for the Postmasburg hospital after an oversight inspection revealed serious service delivery failures.
The oversight was prompted by a delay in the transfer of a learner who had been stabbed, to the Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe Hospital in Kimberley. Last year, the DA also conducted oversight at the hospital after a patient was found lying on a dirty floor, in catheter spillage.
The hospital continues to epitomize the critical lack of care in the provincial health sector and remains in urgent need of reform, despite previous concerns raised with the department.
The hospital is severely unstaffed.
It doesn’t have any surgeons or theatre nurses and requires two surgeons and four theatre nurses to operationalise its theatre. Patients are therefore referred to Kimberley, aggravating the growing surgery backlog in the province.
The hospital also only has two midwives as opposed to six. This leaves one midwife to work per shift, to oversee between 10 and 12 maternity patients on any given day. The single midwife must also assist in the TB ward and the casualty section. In such situations, she has to leave her patients in the care of a nursing assistant.
This significantly compromises patient care she can provide to patients and presents cross-ward infection and places immense strain on the midwives, leading to potential burnout.
Only one machine is working in the laundry room, while the dryer has been out of order for seven months. Linen must either be sent to Kuruman or dried in the sun, which presents a further infection control risk for sterile linen and gowns.
Aging infrastructure is also not maintained and sewage spills on the premises pose further health and safety risks to patients and staff.
The challenges experienced at Postmasburg hospital are not isolated. A sweeping approach, like implementing the poorly planned National Health Insurance, will also not solve its problems.
The DA has submitted our findings to Health MEC, Maruping Lekwene. We have also urged him to develop a step-by-step turn-around plan, to ensure adequate staffing, resourcing and infrastructure maintenance, to be able to transform service delivery at Postmasburg hospital, and the many other health facilities like it.