Health
Question by:
Hon Rachel Windvogel
Answered by:
Hon Nomafrench Mbombo
Question Number:
4
Question Body:
With regard to service pressures at public healthcare facilities:
- Whether there have been any reported cases of service pressures at healthcare facilities in the province; if so, what are the relevant details;
- whether there are any shortages of (a) beds and (b) staff at our public healthcare facilities; if so, what are the details of each of our public healthcare facilities;
- whether it has been brought to her attention that patients have been sleeping on the floor for days at the Khayelitsha District Hospital without receiving medical attention; if so, what are the relevant details?
Answer Body:
The Department is scaling up comprehensive health services and have seen increases in the uptake of health service and hospital admissions. However, the health platform has sufficient available capacity to admit both COVID-19 and non-COVID cases. The bed utilisation across the province is running at an average of 75% over the last few weeks.
- As part of our staffing planning pre-COVID we have planned for the extra staff requirements to be offset by reallocation of staff within a hospital, appointment of agency staff, active recruitment of staff through block advertisements continue, recruiting staff through the HWSETA intern programmes and redeployment of staff between public hospitals. This enables us to maintain essential services despite pressure on our staffing resources.
- It is not the hospital policy to allow patients to sleep on the floor. There are intermittently times when patients do wait a bit longer to be admitted to a ward. While staff request patients to remain seated in their chairs they sometimes ignore this request and proceed to lay on the floor on their own accord. We will however address this issue and ensure that patients are treated humanely and with diginity.
Date:
Friday, October 16, 2020
