Whooo haaa .........Party time !!!

Joburg's 2010 stadiums 'on schedule'

WOW, LETS PARTY!

Meanwhile back at the ranch. The vast majority of the population will not attend any of these games as they simply cannot afford the taxi fare to the stadium, and are just too damn busy trying to survive another day.

EL hospitals’ equipment shortages a ‘nightmare’

CONCERNED East London Hospital Complex doctors this week said that the complex had run out of x-ray film, among other basic materials.

The doctors and other medical staff from Frere and Cecilia Makiwane hospitals explained that the shortages compromised health care delivery, and blamed this for their failure to pick up the pelvic injuries of a crash victim three weeks ago. Sindiswa Teyise had been taken to Frere Hospital and put through the necessary procedures to pick up breaks in any of her bones.

“But because they had used carbon instead of x-ray film they had missed fractures,” said a doctor, who had seen the x-rays. The injuries, from a car accident in which she had lost her two-month old baby earlier on, were picked up at Settler’s Hospital in Grahamstown later that day, where she was diagnosed as having a double pelvic fracture. A doctor said:

“The fracture is not visible on the carbon, it is of poor quality and can only show bigger injuries that stand out.”

The staff put the problems down to a failure by procurement officials to order basic materials on time, and orders had been caught up in a freeze on hospital procurement until the beginning of the new financial year in April. “By the time the department ordered the stoppage of all procurement we were already deep in trouble,” they said.

The fact that there is no clinical director to deal with these issues made things worst, they added.

“All they see are patients coming in and out, some looking better, so they assume we have performed miracles.” Staff at the hospital told of a gross shortage of surgical consumables, saying the day-to-day running of the hospital had become a nightmare.

They said equipment, forever in need of either being repaired or replaced, was also in serious short supply. “BP (blood pressure) and ultrasound machines are wheeled between departments all the time, we borrow from each other as the demand requires,” a doctor said. Requesting anonymity for fear of victimisation, staff and heads of various departments said they ran short of gloves, needles, swabs and gauze for cleaning and dressing wounds on a daily basis.

They did not know how long they could continue. “Surgeons have been cancelling operations because of the shortage of surgical essentials,” the Dispatch was told. Only emergencies were not cancelled.

Theatre, medical and surgical wards said they were short of bare essentials needed to keep the hospital running. The complex was seriously short of bandages and plasters, syringes and needles.

“We have no cotton wool and tubes to feed patients, and there has been no replacing of broken down equipment,” one doctor said.

The neurology department said it had to borrow equipment from private hospitals to treat more serious patients. Late yesterday afternoon, complex CEO Vuyo Mosana said he was still investigating the alleged shortages. Source

DA names 'the country's five worst hospitals'

Rats and cockroaches, discarded wheelchairs, and babies sharing incubators are just some of the things the Democratic Alliance has found at the "five worst public hospitals in South Africa".

DA MP Dianne Kohler-Barnard on Wednesday named Gauteng's Natalspruit Hospital, the Eastern Cape's Umtata General and Cecilia Makiwane hospitals, Mpumalanga's Rob Ferreira Hospital and Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Hospital in KwaZulu Natal as the party's pick of the country's most disgraceful hospitals.

More worrying, she said, was that three of the hospitals - Rob Ferreira, Umtata and Natalspruit - were part of the health department's much trumpeted hospital revitalization plan. Source

State hospitals 'in crisis'

State hospitals in KwaZulu-Natal are on the verge of collapse and it is only a matter of time before more patients die as a result. This is the fear of senior doctors who say they are at the end of their tether, and have revealed that staff at hospitals are working under intolerable conditions, and have patients who are dying when they should not. Source

Child deaths in SA hospitals under spotlight

Sixty-three percent of child deaths in South African hospitals could be avoided, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) heard on Thursday.

"Thirty-one percent of those children died during their first 24 hours in hospital," Dr Mphele Mulaudzi told a commission hearing in Johannesburg. Source

South Africa's ticking time bomb...

The South African health-care system is showing a steady collapse which is worrying health officials countrywide. Yet nobody seems able to turn the problem around - there are far too many patients and not enough medical staff to treat them.Source

The health-infracture of South Africa, once the best on the continent, is deteriorating fast. This was the warning by the 2008 health review of the South African Human Rights Commission. Source

Paramedic shortage in 2010.

There are only 500 left in the country and they are still leaving.

Watch the video

Roll on 2010,....party time in the rainbow nation..... Whoooo haaaaa!

What a great way to blow our taxes while the rest of the country and its infrastructure is falling apart.