Images of a horror hospital: mothers dying on the ground and rats feeding on sewage

When key personnel go on strike or have a coronavirus, nurses in the Eastern Cape are also forced to be cleaners, and surgeons wash hospital clothes. There are also troubling reports of fetal deaths in overcrowded and understaffed maternity wards, the BBC reports.

While doctors, unions, and management struggled with scarce resources, a senior doctor described the situation as “a major failure of a highly corrupt system” and another spoke of “institutional exhaustion, chronic exploitation, a Health Department practically bankrupt and a stumbled system without strategic management. “

This information came to light at a time when the Republic of South Africa, which had successfully resisted coronavirus for several months with the early introduction of strict but economically unprofitable quarantine, was experiencing a rapid increase in COVID-19 infection. . The country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has been forced to warn the nation that “a storm is coming.”

Fear and exhaustion

With the onset of the health care crisis that has most affected the city of Port Elizabeth, the crucial question arises: how have those months been used or wasted by government officials without a coronavirus?

“There is a lot of fear, people are very exhausted mentally and emotionally. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, we had a minimum number of employees, and now they have been reduced by another 30%,” said Dr. John Black

“Due to the enormous workload, the provision of some medical services is starting to stagnate.” COVID-19 opened all the obsolete wounds in the system. There are many conflicts, “he continued, confirming reports that patients were” fighting for oxygen cylinders “in a room at Livingstone Hospital in Port Elizabeth.

Dr. Black, one of the province’s two infectious disease specialists, where approximately 7 million people live. people, the only one of all the Port Elizabeth doctors agreed to give a formal interview. Dozens of other nurses and doctors spoke only anonymously for fear of losing their jobs.

Red rats

Doctors and nurses at Livingstone Hospital, the COVID-19 district’s main hospital, spoke of “images of war”, debris and blood on the floor, lack of personal protective equipment, lack of oxygen cylinders, and very few ambulances. Ventilated rooms and patients sleeping under the newspapers. It was also seen in rats eating dark red hospital waste dumped directly into the sewer.

“The last few doctors tried to perform the most urgent surgeries, they were on call, cleaning the floor along with one or two of the remaining nurses. The older nurses were doing the laundry,” wrote a doctor in an email.

“I go to work every day out of fear,” admitted the head nurse who had just finished her shift.

“The number of infections is increasing. There is chaos every day. The different rooms are full of pregnant women,” said another nurse.

Floors covered in human waste, bags full of medical waste in the hallways, beds without sheets, and naked patients covered with sheets being taken to theaters.

This was the scene at Livingstone Hospital in the Eastern Cape in early June. Https://t.co/BhzjzI5fzv pic.twitter.com/MXJoyFNXkp
– City Press (@City_Press) July 15, 2020

Dying women and babies

Several doctors said staff were seriously traumatized by a recent tragedy when the maternity ward at Dora Nginza Hospital in Port Elizabeth was so crowded that several mothers and newborns died.

“I myself attended two births when the babies were still, and I know there were more similar cases. Very strange. “Several pregnant women and babies died in a hospital in a week, which is completely unheard of and unacceptable,” said one doctor.

He believes the death was almost certainly caused by a severe staff shortage: Emergency surgeries for pregnant women often wait more than a day, sometimes even in the hallways. The other three medical officials, aware of the situation in the wards, have confirmed reports of an unusually high number of fetal deaths in recent weeks.

The deepening of the crisis has been exacerbated by a lack of good governance, with different hospital departments beginning to fight each other and using COVID-19 as “an opportunity to shed light on all the injustices they have suffered,” an official said.

Livingstone Hospital in the Eastern Cape is falling apart.

So before you freak out about “overflowing hospitals,” first check the context. pic.twitter.com/DXqe5loUkb
– Jerm (@mynameisjerm) July 15, 2020

Livingstone Hospital has been operating without a permanent executive director or administration for a year and a half. The previous administrative team was fired on suspicion of corruption. “We have not had a manager for a while,” said Dr. Black also complained that there was no “strong leader” capable of stabilizing the growing conflicts between different wards in a hospital, and especially between local unions.

Apparently, the Livingstone Hospital staff was divided into three distinct groups:

• A handful of people still go to work driven by a sense of duty and ignore the risk. “I can’t give up. These are our families, our children, our mothers,” said a nurse about her patients;
• People in the second group are overwhelmed with fear and frustration, so they are not ready to go back to work. “They don’t necessarily want to, they are just afraid,” said a doctor;
• and the third group: “Only people who interfere with work, passive or openly aggressive. There are many of them, “said another source. They no longer have a touch of” altruism or a sense of duty. “These qualities are gone.”