EFF march to demand better healthcare services
Jane Furse
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in Makhuduthamaga Local Municipality, has given Jane Furse Hospital seven working days to respond to their memorandum, handed over to the hospital management during a march organized last week Thursday.
The party was complaining about shoddy healthcare services that they said cripple the public health institution.
In their memorandum, the party listed numerous concerns that it said contributes to shoddy healthcare services within the health institution.
Their concerns include water shortages in the entire facility, ill-treatment of patients by hospital staff members, patients’ limited access to bathrooms resulting in them spending days without taking a bath, empty reservoir that fail to supply the hospital with water, non-functional boreholes and failure of implementation of a multi-million rands 6 months renewal water supply contracts of service providers.
The EFF is also complaining about shortage of specialists including dentists and optometrists, long grasses that are not properly maintained in the hospital environment, posing danger to patients to be attacked by wild animals and snakes, dilapidated hospital building that has never been maintained or renovated, nepotism in the kitchen appointment and in Community Works Programme (CWP) and Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) posts, insourcing of security personnel, nepotism and sabotage of local businesses by panel of contractors.
EFF Coordinator in Makhuduthamaga, Funi Dolamo, said they are fed-up with poor healthcare services and they decided to go and complain to Jane Furse Hospital management.
“We march because we are tired of the hospital staff members who neglect patients and fail to treat them with dignity they deserve within the public health institution,” she said.
Dolamo said the party is also more concerned about the collapse of infrastructure and inadequate resources in the hospital, which contribute mainly to the delivery of poor services to the people of Makhuduthamaga villages.
“The hospital is collapsing bit by bit with all its most important equipment broken and malfunctioning as we speak and nobody cares about the situation. We are also worried about corpses that are kept on hospital beds for days until there are discovered by their relatives during hospital visits,” Dolamo said.
She said they have given the hospital management an ultimatum of seven working days to respond to their memorandum of demands.
“If the response fail to reach us within the seven day period, we are going to mobilize all our branches in Sekhukhune Region and organize a mother of all marches to call for the resignation of the hospital management,” she said.
