What’s far scarier than a haunted, abandoned hospital in Kempton Park?

Earlier this week we ran an article about the mystery surrounding the hospital in Kempton Park that was somewhat mysteriously “abandoned” by government in 1996.

Since then, the state has spent millions to guard it and its contents, which supposedly still includes costly medical equipment that was left behind in the aftermath of some sort of weird mass evacuation of staff and patients.

Apparently government in its wisdom decided it wanted to decentralise healthcare and take it to the townships (or something like that) and so redeployed everyone accordingly.

I can almost still picture a half-consumed, steaming cup of coffee and a thin trail of cigarette smoke above a metal ashtray in the staff room, where the doctors and nurses were “raptured” to Tembisa and elsewhere on that fateful Boxing Day in December.

Since then, the things that always happen to uninhabited buildings have happened to Kempton Park hospital. It has become a favoured “dark touristy” destination for teenagers trying to make Blair Witch-type home movies, if they can get past security.

The Citizen has been there a few times (with permission, mind you), and I’ll concede it does look rather creepy and haunted.

The mystery of the hospital appears to have only deepened over the years. Claims that it will be demolished and rebuilt have been contradicted by news of a R12.8 million investigation by a group of engineers into its structural integrity, which was completed in 2015. That apparently discovered there were no major structural problems, and recommended the facility be refurbished and opened as a district hospital at a cost of R1.1 billion.

Upon reading about this, two of my younger colleagues came bouncing into my office earlier this week asking if they couldn’t mount a bit of an adventure to the abandoned facility, to look for ghosts.

“You know there’s no such thing as ghosts, right?” I told one of them. She has purple hair.

“Ja, ja. But we’re going to have an ectoplasm sensor [I swear she said something of the sort, and it’s apparently even an app on her phone] just to be sure.”

The other one said: “Come on, Jefe!” (She always calls me this, because she once lived in the Amazon rainforest).

Resisting the urge not to roll my eyes too much (and failing), I said: “Okay, then. Knock yourselves out!”

A bit later in the day I went to them and asked: “You know what’s waaaaay scarier and horrifying than an abandoned government hospital?”

“What!?” they answered.

“Well … an active government hospital.”

There was a brief silence, and the one with purple hair answered: “You see, this is why it’s better to just believe in haunted buildings and ghosts. Because reality sucks.”

It prompted a minor office discussion about the state of public healthcare in South Africa, which really is in quite a state. Most people you speak to have a blood-curdling anecdote or two, most of which end with sentiments like, “I’d rather go hungry than not pay my medical aid.”

I can personally relate, since I lost my father in 2015 after surgeons in Bloemfontein completely bungled his cancer operation. I still vividly remember his ICU room, with no air-conditioning and an obese diabetic in one corner who was slowly having pieces of himself amputated, so there was less of him left on the bed every time we went to visit.

I needed therapy not only for my father’s death but the healthcare experience itself.

And that was one of the country’s better hospitals.

Last month, the DA crowned Jubilee Hospital in Hammanskraal the worst in Gauteng, but it was apparently a close-run thing, with Pholosong, Helen Joseph, Far East Rand, Kopanong, South Rand, Tambo Memorial, Bheki Mlangeni, Mamelodi, Sebokeng, Leratong, Rahima Moosa and the George Mukhari hospitals in a photo finish for this dubious honour.

People responded to the DA’s social media campaign with frightening stories of conditions at government hospitals.

One respondent said Jubilee was a place where “some bleed the whole night until going mad”.

Pholosong in Tsakane was described as an “abattoir”. “You go in there alive and come out as a corpse.”

At Bheki Mlangeni, another said people “die by the hundreds” each month, “even in the queues”.

Kopanong was apparently transporting patients to and from Sebokeng Hospital at night because they didn’t have an X-ray scanner. “This is a pre-mortuary hospital,” claimed the respondent.

And it’s certainly not just a Gauteng problem. After years of gruelling study and on-the-job work at Chris Hani Baragwanath and Joburg General – to finally be certified a doctor at Wits – one of my friends only got through a month or two in her medical placement to Groote Schuur in Cape Town before she suffered something of a complete nervous breakdown.

These hospitals are not just hard on the patients. They are murderous on the staff (well, the ones who still actually care anyway).

Which brings me to the announcement today that our government will be pushing onward determinedly to implement “universal quality healthcare” through the National Health Insurance Bill.

In principle, it’s a great idea. In practice, maybe a whole other story.

The bald fact is that public healthcare is a tragic disaster, like almost all other government-owned services. Maybe throwing more money at this problem (after taking this money from the few people who still have some of it) will be a solution.

I hope so, I really do. It’s objectively abhorrent that people with a bit of cash to spare to desperately pool it together for a medical aid fund can enjoy vastly better healthcare than the many people who don’t.

However, it would be even more ghastly if the end result of all this is that everyone simply has to be subjected to queues in hospitals designed to kill you, whether you have some money or not.

That scares me quite a bit more than Kempton Park’s ghosts.

Citizen digital editor Charles Cilliers

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