The Gamalakhe Community Health Centre held an open day event under the theme, “Shared vision improvement on areas of deficits and a 5 year sustainable goals” on Friday, last week.
The Health Centre’s Deputy Nursing Manager, Thoko Ntuli said the purpose of the event was for the community to know the centre better in terms of the challenges and how the centre can work together with the community to overcome the challenges.
Also, Gamalakhe Community Health Centre CEO, Dr Frank Shongwe said they will strive to ensure that the community of Gamalakhe receives best quality care.
Shongwe said their main objective is to improve patient experience, reduce long waiting times and complaints related to the attitude of staff.
He added that he has learned that there are number of complaints related to missing patient records, saying that as a facility they have embarked on archiving all files that belongs to patients that visited the facility in the last 10 years in order to create more space.
“When the clinic was expanded as a Community Health Centre (CHC), the filing department was not extended. Being a CHC means we are no longer seeing patients from Gamalakhe only but also from other catchment areas like Margate, Shelly Beach, Gcilima, KwaNzimakwe, Bhomela, Mvutshini and Port Edward. We want to work with communities to ensure that the centre provides best quality care service at all times,” said Shongwe, adding that staff members that fail to treat patients with courtesy will be dealt with as staff attitude ruins the image of the facility.
Shongwe added: “How can you send your family member and loved ones knowing that there will be treated badly. As management, we want those complaints because this centre is for the community. We don’t want people leaving the facility because of staff members that do not know how to treat patients.”
Gamalakhe CHC public relations officer, Lifa Radebe said residents are to follow the health department’s complaints procedure such as lodging a complaint and putting it inside the complaints boxes situated in every service area.
Radebe said compliments or suggestions can be sent to 064 338 0995 or 073 432 5826.
Alternatively, emails can be sent to lifa.radebe@kznhealth.gov.za or frank.shongwe@kznhealth.gov.za.
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