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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
A group of workers staged a strike at Witrand psychiatric hospital in Potchefstroom trashing several sections in the facility and terrifying mental health patients.
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.
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.
National Health Insurance is supposed to shrink the gulf between the public and private health sector. SECTION27 Researcher Thabang Pooe recently experienced both sides in one day. Here she reflects on her observations.
Spotlight returned to the North West recently to take the temperature of the health system. Sadly, the picture is not pretty. The health system has faced massive protests at health facilities, rampant corruption, staff shortages, drug supply challenges and a myriad other problems. One mother shared her story of loss.