South Africa moved to level three of its COVID-19 lockdown this week meaning, significantly relaxed lockdown regulations. In many townships in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, residents have mixed views on life under lockdown. Luvuyo Mehlwana visited some townships and spoke to residents.
Rhodes University and the Eastern Cape Department of Rural Development and Agrarian Reform are working together to make sure more people have access to hand sanitiser.
As the country intensifies its efforts to curb COVID-19 through mass screening and testing, stigma in some communities threatens to derail these efforts. Luvuyo Mehlwana reports on the situation in the Eastern Cape.
Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Health wrapped up the last public hearings on the NHI Bill for this year on Monday in King William’s Town. Here is the hearings in pictures.
In a report released today, the Public Service Commission has described seclusion rooms at an Eastern Cape mental health unit as akin to “apartheid secluded prison cells”.
In the rural Eastern Cape a forest and a river can lie between you and the nearest clinic. As one local puts it, “Many people come here and see beauty, we just see suffering”.
The long-suffering Holy Cross Hospital outside Flagstaff, Eastern Cape, has a troubling history. As part of the #Vote4Health series, Spotlight and Health-e News re-visited the hospital after years of turmoil.
As the seasons change and summer becomes a more distant memory, May elections creep closer and closer for the country. Campaign posters line the roadways and fight for space on telephone poles of every city and village.
In Lusikisiki, in the OR Tambo District of the Eastern Cape, the so-called Village Clinic had become emblematic of a faltering health system, in a rural area fraught with chronic illness and early death due to rapidly-spreading HIV and tuberculosis. Biénne Huisman went to Lusikiki to take the community’s temperature. Photographs, Halden Krog.
With less than 2 000 residents, one small government clinic and the nearest hospital 40 kilometres away, Hamburg residents in the small Eastern Cape hamlet are under strain. By Kathryn Cleary.
The Mankosi Clinic story is a long and winding one, very much like the backroads in the Eastern Cape. Kathryn Cleary visited Mankosi Village, where a clinic was built starting in 2010, but eight years later remains empty. This is a story of broken promises and a community with poor access to healthcare.
The Rural Health Advocacy Project’s Samantha Khan-Gillmore makes a impassioned plea for the Office of Health Standards Compliance to be capacitated to do more.
