The West Rand District Health Department has put its foot down following complaints about poor service at a local clinic.
The department’s spokesperson Sandile Gwayi has said that the tea and lunch breaks nurses at local clinics take no longer will affect their quality of service and that making patients wait for hours on end soon will be a thing of the past.
This after local resident Chris Steyn had to wait longer than two hours at the Westonaria Clinic while nurses went on lunch, leaving patients unattended. The story about Steyn’s agony was published in the herald on 22 August. It sparked reaction from other residents who took to the herald‘s website to share their grievances as far as the public health sector is concerned.
One person known as Theo commented on the website saying that there are similar problems at Randgate Clinic.
“If the nurses are not on tea break then they are on lunch. They also spend a lot of time on their cellphones. Also, those doing the rounds are very rude. People waiting at reception are being ignored and in addition to this, the urine cups allegedly are unhygienic.”
Gwayi responded to the complaints about the poor service saying, “As the West Rand District Health we acknowledge that the complainant Steyn visited the clinic on the 12 August 2014 at around 1pm. On the day of his visit, the staff capacity at the clinic was challenged after two nurses did not report for duty owing to unexpected family responsibilities. As a result, nurses had their hands full and worked tirelessly to attend to the people in the queues.
“To ensure that such things do not happen again, measures have been put in place by the clinic management to ensure that patients are attended to speedily. We have come to recognise the challenges and as ways of resolving them, we have come up with the solution that managers should take turns to oversee service delivery in the clinic.
“Also, tea and lunch breaks neither should affect the services rendered to our patients nor disadvantage them,” says Gwayi.
“A professional nurse will monitor patient triaging and queue management in the absence of a customer relations officer. Although government clinics on the West Rand are not experiencing challenges associated with long queues, the District Quality Assurance management plans put queue marshals in all clinics,” he explains.
“I appeal to our clinic users to use the complaints line displayed on the posters put up at the facilities as a first option to report poor service delivery before resorting to media, as some of the complaints can be dealt with immediately at the facilities”.
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