#Vote4Health: Visuals of Northern Cape collapse
Health services in large parts of the Northern Cape have virtually collapsed with communities mostly being served by overstretched nurses struggling to cope with the disease and injury burden. The…
#FootSoldiers: Umsebenzi wama CHWs – Bringing hope and life to the community of Sweetwaters
Spotlight has gone in search of the foot soldiers of the health system, the folk who get the job done quietly and with little fanfare. Nomatter Ndebele and Thom Pierce went to Sweetwaters in KwaZulu-Natal for a reunion with the original Community Health Worker Doris Ntuli.
#People: Face to face with Jack Bloom
When it comes to healthcare, Jack Bloom is arguably the most well-known opposition politician in South Africa. Biénne Huisman went to meet the man behind the headlines.
#Vote4Health: Seven years of struggle at Holy Cross Hospital
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.
#Vote4Health: More than a bucket and a plaster to fix rural healthcare
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.
#Vote4Health: Still no end in sight to orthopaedic disaster in Free State
Orthopaedic surgery backlogs have become old news at Bloemfontein’s Pelonomi Hospital, but it’s still fresh hell for the patients admitted every day and forced to sleep on chairs, on floors and on stretchers pushed up against corridor walls waiting for beds, often for weeks.
#Vote4Health: New hope as Lusikisiki finally gets a new clinic
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.
Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal Circulars on migrants may be a sign of things to come
OPINION: The first few days of March 2019 must have been a time of great uncertainty for migrants in South Africa in need of health care services. Circulars by the Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal health departments said that all non-South Africans, other than refugees, would from now on have to pay in full for all health care services at public clinics and hospitals. By Sasha Stevenson
Vote4Health: Artist colony paints dull picture for rural healthcare
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.
Health4Sale: Limpopo air ambulance service grounded after dodgy contract
Two doctors who run a small-scale ambulance service in Louis Trichardt (Makhado) in Limpopo with no aeromedical experience, landed a lucrative air ambulance contract with the provincial health department which has already paid out close to R3-million in four months. By Anso Thom and Marcus Low
Strike terrifies mental health patients in North West
A group of workers staged a strike at Witrand psychiatric hospital in Potchefstroom trashing several sections in the facility and terrifying mental health patients.
Opinion: The devastating cost of the North West strikes
Nearly a year on from the crippling health sector strikes in the North West province the full cost is still to emerge. UFRIEDA HO reflects that even the “victors” lost.