A broken finger that should have been easily treated turned into a major drama for an Eastern Cape patient, who was forced to travel 350km for treatment, according to the hospital board chair this week.
News24 reports that the patient was referred from Aliwal North Hospital to Frere Hospital in East London last year after the facility in Maletswai (formerly Aliwal North) was unable to treat provide treatment because of a lack of resources.
Frere Hospital board chairperson Bantwini Deliwe told senior Eastern Cape Department of Health officials in East London on Monday that staff at Frere were overwhelmed by referrals over issues which were not life-threatening.
The officials, including Health MEC Ntandokazi Capa, were at Frere for a welcoming ceremony of 50 newly appointed staff: 24 nurses, 11 medical doctors, four clinical specialists, four physiotherapists, two heads of clinical units, two HoDs, one senior manager for medical services, one speech therapist, and one occupational therapist.
“Doctors (at Frere) complained about a patient being transferred from Aliwal North to Frere and having to treat him here just for a broken finger,” he added.
“My brother, whose leg was broken in King William’s Town (now Qonce), was transferred from Grey Hospital to Frere because they could not treat him there. These referrals over issues that would have been resolved at a provincial or district hospital are overworking the staff at Frere. Unfortunately, a patient cannot be turned away at Frere.”
Deliwe said Frere, as a tertiary hospital, was supposed to deal with critical matters, “but it finds itself dealing with almost everything else, putting an overload on the existing staff”.
“I have been a board member of Frere Hospital for three years before becoming its chairperson last year, and we have been fighting for years for the employment of critical staff like doctors and specialists.
“We are happy they have hired some staff, but not all vacant positions have been filled.”
Capa admitted Frere was “overstretched”, serving about 20 000 patients per month, and not quite ready for NHI.
“This a tertiary hospital, providing services that are not available at district hospitals. What we have done is to appoint specialists to visit the hospitals, who are referring their patients to Frere.
“We are also decentralising specialised units. We opened a dialysis unit at St Elizabeth Hospital in Lusikisiki, and will open specialised units at Frontier Hospital in Komani.”
“In the current financial year and the next financial year (2026/27), we will be able to fill vacancies of close to one million across the province,” added the MEC.
In 2024, Capa announced in her policy speech a move to “repurpose” about 19 hospitals in the province, which were considered too small to provide provincial hospital services.
She said they had not ditched the idea.
The province has 92 hospitals – but the MEC said some of the facilities that were classified as hospitals were, in fact, community health centres.
She added her department still needed to consult with the communities, “because when you change a facility from a hospital to a community health centre, communities are not happy”.
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