No beds: surgery patients sent home
Several complaints have been made by patients, scheduled for surgery, who have been sent home due to the lack of beds at the Pietersburg Provincial Hospital.
POLOKWANE – “We have had enough of the department’s poor service and are fed up with the hospital ‘giving us the run around’.
“The MEC promised to take charge and hold employees accountable if they don’t do their work, but its all empty promises because we do not see a change at the Pietersburg Provincial Hospital.”
“They give us dates to come to the hospital so why do they not plan accordingly? Not only is our health deteriorating with the prolonged wait, but it also costs us a lot of money because we use public transport to come to the hospital on the given dates and than we are sent home without being helped.”
It is frustrating because we are sick and although the hospital considers us as cold patients and not emergency patients, to us we are emergency patients because they do not know the pain we go through daily. We would not come to the hospital for help if we did not need it,” the patients explained to Review.
One patient said the hospital’s consolation for not helping patients is to prescribe antibiotics and pain medication.
Another patient who has problems with his prostate, said for more than a year the hospital has been giving him the run around.
“My prostate is so badly swollen I cannot urinate. My children had to rush me to the emergency unit a month ago where the doctors at the emergency ward made a hole in my bladder to attach the catheter, as it was the only way out. I am a chronic patient and suffer from hypertension and diabetes.”
The man said he counted down the days to his hospital appointment, which was Friday.
“To my disappointment, I was yet again told there is no bed available for me. This is the third time that I am sent away for this reason.”
Spokesperson for the Department of Health, Derick Kganyago, confirmed the shortage of beds and said plans are in place to build a new academic hospital in Limpopo.
“Pietersburg Provincial Hospital has a bed capacity of 498 usable beds and 12 ICU beds. There are 19 disciplines to be serviced by these beds with each ward having about 32 beds, so the challenges experienced are infrastructural which cannot be sorted overnight. We are expanding the units by refurbishing some of the available spaces to create high care facilities,” Kganyago said.
Seshego and Mankweng hospitals are used as “overflow” and doctors work on weekends to reduce the elective cases.
“There is also human resource issues in terms of specialist shortages. We are in process of appointing a urologist to relieve pressure in order to address these challenges. Most patients which are admitted need to be operated unfortunately some of the patients lose out on beds because there is a high number of emergency patients who take up the beds which might have been reserved for the elective patients.
“It is not the intention of the hospital to return patients. Some of our specialist clinics see on average 100 to 120 patients per day these pose a challenge if some of those patients become an emergency themselves,” Kganyago explained.
