The Democratic Alliance (DA) calls on the Northern Cape MEC of Health to urgently restore 24-hour emergency medical services in the Hantam area.
This comes after yesterday’s late-night death of a former DA councillor and activist, which has shone the spotlight on the critical lack of emergency services in the region of Hantam and Karoo Hoogland. Following her passing, at around 11pm last night, her family had still not received any services a full twelve hours later, traumatizing her family and causing additional distress to the already grieving family.
When calls to the local call centre number were not answered, we eventually discovered that ambulances in the Calvinia area were only operating from 8am until 8pm every day, due to a shortage of staff and a subsequent agreement reached between the health department and the overworked ambulance drivers.
Worryingly however, no mitigation strategy was put in place, effectively abandoning residents who may be in need of lifesaving medical care, after hours.
This was confirmed when I contacted the call centre in Upington, which indicated that an agreement was made with the department not to send ambulances from other districts to the Hantam district, because of their own capacity constraints. This includes there being only two operational ambulances in the vast Upington area.
The DA is deeply concerned about the wellbeing of the people of Hantam, who are largely reliant on government health care services. Young women who go into labour in the middle of the night, or people who fall ill and those who are involved in motor vehicle accidents, will have no medical help after 8pm.
For years, the DA has been asking the health department to improve its increasingly deadly EMS service by appointing adequately trained staff and developing a proper repair and vehicle replacement management strategy. This must go beyond yearly ad hoc purchases that only replace broken ambulances as opposed to genuinely boosting the EMS fleet. The low output of trained EMS personnel from the provincial training facility and slow turnaround time for ambulance repairs also remains worrisome and requires urgent attention.
MEC Maruping Lekwene has repeatedly told us that they are addressing the shortfalls in the EMS and that this year they would again procure 30 ambulances and eight patient transport vehicles. Yet, patients don’t experience the difference in EMS accessibility.
The Hantam community is tired of the empty promises.
The DA has written to Lekwene, asking that an interim mitigation strategy be immediately instituted, to ensure that residents in Hantam have 24-hour access to EMS services. We will also continue to apply pressure to the department to once and for all fix its broken ambulance service.
No one should have to suffer or die because of a basic lack of access to healthcare.