The Laetitia Bam Clinic will reopen at night from Monday after several security interventions there were announced to workers.
In a lengthy meeting on Thursday attended by officials from both the district office and provincial office of the department of health, several new security measures at the besieged clinic were announced.
Unhappy nurses – dancing and singing – lined the foyer outside the boardroom where the meeting was held.
They were unhappy as a meeting to hear their concerns, scheduled for earlier in the day, had been cancelled.
The clinic, normally operating 24 hours a day, has been closed after hours since last week when security guards were tied up and robbed.
This was the latest in a series of crimes at the facility.
Treatment Action Campaign’s general secretary, Anele Yawa, said it also heard this week how patients would take out knives to threaten nurses over appointments and how a family member tried to run a nurse down in the parking lot after a man died at the facility.
“We are unhappy about the unfair treatment of nurses at the facility,” Yawa said.
“For a long time people who worked at that facility have lived in fear, but they have never received any counselling or debriefing.”
Yawa said the nightshift nurses had been working dayshift for the past week.
“It is not true that they were not at work,” he said.
“The department issued them with warning letters before even announcing better security at the clinic.”
Yawa said they would be intervening and writing to health minister Aaron Motsoaledi and the superintendent-general, Dr Thobile Mbengashe, to ask them to have the warnings issued to the nurses withdrawn.“If this doesn’t happen we might very well have a strike. We will stand by the nurses over this issue and we will support them.”
He said the new, working, panic buttons going through to the police and an armed response company had been tested on Thursday afternoon.
“We knew the response would be quick today because people are watching, but we will monitor it,” he said.
One of the nurses at the facility, who asked not to be named, said she was happy We are unhappy about unfair treatment of nurses that their problems were being addressed but she still had some reservations.
“I’m glad to hear that we now have working panic buttons but my worry is how long the response will take.
“Previously the security company did not respond to numerous phone calls.”
Another nurse said she was happy they were finally being heard but was concerned about what they had to do to get action.
“We have been complaining about this for some time now . . . but our call fell on deaf ears.”
Health spokesperson Lwandile Sicwetsha said the situation at the clinic was being handled and he would communicate only once all issues were resolved.