End of an era for McCord
After months of negotiations with the Department of Health the Board of McCord Hospital have terminated negotiations and the hospital is due to shut down this Friday.
IT is the end of an era, one that spanned more than a century, as McCord Hospital officially closes its doors this Friday, 20 September.
The embattled hospital announced in January that it might shut down after the Department of Health failed to renew funding but KZN MEC for Health, Dr Sibongiseni Dhlomo threw the hospital a lifeline offering to take over the healthcare services at McCord so it didn’t have to close at the end of March.
Last month protesting staff outside the hospital indicated that the hospital’s future once again hung in the balance but the Department of Health thwarted the fears, saying the take over of the hospital by province was imminent.
“Negotiations have so progressed that there is now an agreement awaiting to be signed to effect the take-over of McCord Hospital by the Provincial Government by September 2013,” Sam Mkhwanazi, spokesperson for the KZN Health Department said last month.
When contacted last week, Mkhwanazi told Berea Mail there were no updates on the negotiations. However when contacted on Tuesday when news broke that the hospital was closing its doors this week, he said he could not comment on the closure as “McCord was not a public hospital.”
Meanwhile the McCord Hospital Board released a statement announcing the closure on Tuesday.
“The Board of MCord Hospital sincerely regrets the termination of the negotiations aimed at selling the hospital to the KZN DoH. This means that the hospital will be closed effective on Friday 20 September.
“As a result many jobs will be lost and the outstanding work done by McCord Hospital over a hundred years will come to an end.”
The reduction in funding from the Department of Health is what precipitated the looming closure or sale of the hospital this year because the hospital could no longer viably operate their Service Level Agreement under the reduced income.
“The reason why the parties could not reach agreement in respect of the possible sale or the takeover of the hospital was simply that the Department of Health refused to offer a realistic price for the assets comprising the hospital. The department’s final offer was insufficient to even cover all the hospital’s liabilities.”
The statement went on to say: “To have accepted this offer, the Board of the hospital would have been acting in contravention of the law and of its own Memorandum and Articles.”
Aside from not offering a “realistic” price for the hospital, the Board said the department was not prepared to entertain the possibility of taking over McCord’s employees separately from the hospital operation itself.
The closure of the popular mission hospital will also exacerbate the province’s shortage of beds.
In a statement in the media this week, National Hospital Association head Dumisani Bomela alleges that there were only two beds in both the private and public healthcare sector for every thousand in KZN and added that the closure of McCord Hospital was of concern.
