Cosatu statement on Frere Hospital 30-07-07

 

Frere Hospital

The Congress of South African Trade Unions has noted the Letter from the President in ANC Today, of 27 July 2007, which disputes the veracity of a report in the Daily Dispatch, which claimed that"

"Hundreds of newborns are dying every year at Frere Hospital's overburdened maternity section - and the institution's own records reveal the scale of negligence behind many of the deaths...The Dispatch team spent nearly two months walking the maternity wards with hidden cameras, attending the mass burial of dead babies and interviewing medical staff and heartbroken mothers...Minutes from weekly management meetings reveal damning admissions by doctors that patients were dying because of outright negligence...

"2 000 babies were stillborn in the past 14 years at Frere, according to the Abortions and Stillbirth book in the labour ward. Last year's figures appear to be the highest on record, when at least 199 babies were stillborn. Frere's official baby mortality rate exceeds provincial and national figures as contained in an unpublished report by a unit of the Medical Research Council."

The President contends that this is "lies". His conclusion is based on an internal report by the Department of Health, ten days after the publication of the Daily Dispatch article. This report confirmed that, "basic equipment was available and interviews with the clinical staff and hospital management indicated that no baby has died as a result of the non-availability of equipment. Therefore, the statement that health workers 'play God' and decide which patient lives or dies because of acute shortages of equipment was not found to be true....

The internal report backed this up with statistics to show that Frere Hospital's perinatal and neonatal mortality rates were not much higher than the national average. As SABC News reported on 22 July, "a report released by the health department has dismissed as lies media reports that any of the reported 2,000 infant deaths at Frere Hospital were a result of equipment and staff shortages."

The next day it reported that, "The furore over the death of babies at East London's Frere Hospital rages on. The Congress of SA Trade Unions (COSATU) has now entered the fray, accusing Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the Health Minister, of protecting her provincial counterpart... Today COSATU accused them of closing ranks around the MEC. 'It is very unfortunate that the report tabled by the Minister of Hhealth is contradictory, in terms of not being able to publish the causes of death of the infants in this hospital,' says Xola Phakathi, COSATU's provincial secretary."

We stand fully behind the COSATU Provincial Secretary, but also agree with the President that any comment on the problems at this hospital must be based on facts. Given that there is a contradiction between on the one hand the 'facts' published in the Daily Dispatch, and also an earlier statement by the Deputy Minister of Health, Noziziwe Madlala-Routledge, which agreed with the original Daily Dispatch report, and on the other hand the 'facts' in the Department of Health's response, COSATU calls for an urgent independent public enquiry to establish the true facts about prenatal and neonatal deaths at Frere.

It would be most unfortunate however if an argument about statistics were to divert attention from the very real problems of under resourcing and understaffing at all our public hospitals, including Frere, which the Department of Health's own report actually confirms, when it says:

"The general complement of doctors is reasonable but can be increased... Although there is largely a commitment to service delivery amongst staff, the current levels of staff complement was the main area of concern... There is an urgent need to increase the number of porters, messengers, general assistants and clerical staff and ensure that these categories of health workers are available at all times so that clinical staff can focus on what they have been trained to do... The District Health System must be strengthened to reduce the number of unnecessary referrals and enable the hospital to concentrate on the high-risk patients and thereby improve the perinatal outcomes..."

These problems are not untypical. The President himself says that "the facts communicate the conclusion that neonatal mortality at Frere Hospital is not significantly different from the national incidence of such mortality". In other words the facts reported by the Dispatch were not 'lies', but revealed a situation which turns out to be not much worse than the national figure for the numbers of babies dying in hospitals! In other words he is conceding not that the situation in Frere is satisfactory, but that it is not out of line with appalling national statistics for all hospitals.

COSATU challenges anyone who would deny this to visit any public hospital to witness the appalling conditions - the foul smells and the dirt - under which the overworked staff have to function, because of understaffing and lack of equipment.

One of the main issues raised during the public service strike was the 240 000 vacant posts within the public health service. The settlement reached through the Public service Co-ordinating Bargaining Council committed the government to filling all these posts within 12 months. The public-sector unions will be monitoring the situation to ensure that this is achieved.

COSATU endorses the President's wish to the national and provincial Departments of Health and Frere Hospital every success in their efforts to implement the recommendations contained in the government report. Like him, we salute and thank the staff at Frere Hospital for its "commitment to service delivery". We appreciate the terrible conditions under which they, and workers at other state hospitals, have to work. But we will not stop campaigning for the necessary improvements in staffing and the provision of equipment that all hospitals desperately require.