Editorial: Urgent healthcare shakeup needed

Anyone would have to have serious misgivings about the treatment they may receive at Port Elizabeth’s Livingstone Hospital if a mere case of misfiled paperwork could seriously jeopardise a patient’s health – or worse.

It beggars belief that due to wound care instructions being muddled up, motorcycle accident victim Clint Morris found – to his understandable horror – maggots hatching in his leg after nurses failed adequately to tend to his dressings.

But this was the outcome of a probe by senior doctors as to why Morris was not given the proper care he should have expected, coupled to claims that he had been told to change his dressings himself.

Quite apart from the allegation that he should be responsible for his own post-op care following a skin graft – in itself outrageous – the most worrying aspect of this sickening affair is that there appears to be a complete absence of thorough cross-checking.

Not surprisingly, the hospital’s clinical services senior manager, Dr Mojalefa Maseloa, is upset and says the incident has motivated it to initiate a quality improvement programme while at the same time trying to establish who is alleged to have made the “do-it-yourself” comment.

But a collapse of proper patient care like this simply underlines the fact that people have every reason to be seriously concerned that our state healthcare providers are offering a service which is often seriously compromised. The grave consequences which could easily result are frankly terrifying.

Whether this is an issue of poor management, insufficient training, low morale or under-staffing – or a combination of all four – is beside the point.

The provincial health department and the hospitals it oversees have an obligation to instill a sense of trust in those they serve.

Morris is optimistic enough to believe that his appalling experience may at least – if indeed it does galvanise the authorities – have produced some good.

But we suspect that it is going to be an arduous task which will need direction from the very top.

Best that those who are in charge get on with it.