Nursing staff at Rob Ferreira Hospital in Mbombela have to take kettles to work to ensure their patients have hot water for bathing, because there are no functioning geysers in the dirty and dilapidated 407-bed facility, reports News24.
This was discovered at a recent oversight visit to one of the two tertiary hospitals in Mpumalanga by the SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) and the DA.
The DA’s Ashleigh Trichardt said nurses described having had problems with the hot water supply “as far back as four years ago”, and had given up asking why.
But the lack of hot water was not the only issue. Officials also found the hospital disgustingly dirty, with Trichardt saying it was “shocking to see the conditions patients and staff have to endure”.
Photos taken during the visit show filthy and broken toilets, with some missing seats and cistern lids. Urinals have buckets underneath to catch leaking water, hand basins are used as rubbish bins, and toilet doors are off their hinges.
In one of the sluice rooms, heaps of wet and unwashed linen were piled in a wash basin.
Red biohazard bags, used for the safe disposal of infectious healthcare waste, were stacked on top of an overflowing wheelie bin.
In the male surgical ward, the bathroom of a four-bed room has been out of order and unused for months because of a leak.
Blankets are used to stop the water from flowing out of the room and flooding the ward, Trichardt said, and because of barely any linen and blankets, patients were forced to bring their own.
A serious shortage of beds meant stretchers and even wheelchairs being used in their stead, while some patients were given bare mattresses to sleep on the floor.
Mpumalanga MPL Bosman Grobler called on the Office of Health Standards Compliance and the Health Ombud to hold Health MEC Sasekani Manzini accountable for the systematic and critical failures at the hospital.
Grobler said at the next sitting of the provincial legislature, the DA would table a motion asking for the provincial Health Portfolio Committee to conduct its own oversight at the hospital.
“They must come back and report … on their own findings and make recommendations for immediate and long-term solutions to this problem,” he added.
Provincial Health Department spokesperson Chris Nobela said the affected wards “experienced a shortage of running hot water two weeks ago”.
“Only four wards had a challenge of hot water supply due to a calorifier that was damaged,” he countered. “It is misleading and incorrect to say the hospital has operated without water for four years.”
Nobela said electrical elements were used to boil water for patients, and that the affected wards have since been attended to. He said the hospital had “sufficient linen, and patients who brought their own did so by choice”.
Thobile Sibanyoni from the SAHRC added that a report on the findings would be sent to the head of the Health Department once an inspection of Witbank Hospital had been concluded.
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