Photographer: Rodger Bosch/AFP via Getty Images
The death of a 34-year-old man with Covid-19 who wasn’t fed for 100 hours or attended to by a doctor for almost three days has shown the dire state of some of South Africa’s public hospitals.
Tembisa Provincial Tertiary Hospital near Johannesburg was accused of gross negligence by the country’s health ombudsman after an investigation.
“The problems I have at one of your facilities continues, it is becoming unbearable,” the patient, Shonisani Lethole, told Health Minister Zweli Mkhize in a Tweet two days after his admission to the hospital. “And they don’t seem to care.”
His death sparked outrage on social media in a country where there’s a marked gap in the quality of health care afforded to about 15% of citizens who have medical insurance and the rest of the population. Thousands signed a petition to demand justice.
Lied Under Oath
Lethole was brought to the hospital in June and suffered from stage 4 renal failure after contracting the coronavirus. He wasn’t informed about the test results before his death six days later.
Lethole got no food for 43 hours before he was sedated and didn’t receive a feeding tube for another 57 hours after sedation, according to the investigation. Overall, it took 69 hours before registered medical practitioners assessed his condition. Upon his death, it took another 10 hours to remove his body from the bed.
While his parents brought him food it wasn’t delivered to him because cleaners were afraid to enter the ward without personal protective equipment, according to the report.
The ombudsman concluded in a report published Wednesday that the hospital shouldn’t have been used as a Covid-19 facility and provided substandard care. It put patients with and without Covid-19 in the same ward, barely kept records and failed to move bodies to the mortuary timeously.
Authorities should take disciplinary action against the facility’s chief executive officer and some staff, including those who had lied under oath to investigators or tried to mislead the probe, according to the report. Mkhize ordered the investigation last year.
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January 28, 2021 at 12:01AM
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No Food for 100 Hours: The State of South Africa Health Care - Bloomberg
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