Great service at Tembisa Hospital for only R35

PAST BILL STEYN of Birchleigh writes:

I decided to write this letter at about 4am on September 1 when I was lying in casualty at Tembisa Hospital and not as a response to last week’s letter in Express.

On Sunday night, August 31 at about 9.30pm I had Angina pains. My wife called Carstenhof and was told that as we didn’t have a medical aid, we would be allowed into casualty. We never even bothered phoning Arwyp.

I wanted a simple examination by a doctor and some medication to lower my blood pressure. At Carstenhof I was given an aspirin and hooked up to all machines and blood taken. My wife was asked for R2 100, which she managed to pay and I waited for the blood test results.

After some hours, nothing happened and my wife was told by the doctor that my heart was “damaged” and I needed to go to ICU for three days: R61 000.

A private ambulance was called and I was transferred to Tembisa Hospital. R2 100 and no treatment nor medicine and also facing an account from the lab for R1 400.

The doctor at Carstenhof arranged for me to see the (what I believed to be) senior casualty doctor at Tembisa. When I got there two other women doctors were busy with patients. When they approached me to process me, they were told by the ambulance staff to leave me to the senior doctor, who at that time was busy with a critically ill patient. I wasn’t in cardiac arrest, so his priorities were right.

Eventually, Dr MT Makena, a young woman doctor, did not accept that I should wait any longer and she processed me by examining me. An examination I might add that does not take second place to any I have had by private GP.

I was very impressed. It was now daylight and I was admitted to a ward upon which I was given a cocktail of medicine that reduced my blood pressure within hours.

The senior doctor did see me quickly but was called back to his patient and I was also seen by another doctor before Dr Makena. After two days in Tembisa I was discharged with a bucket load of medicine and the total cost of everything, including all blood tests, X-rays, etc, R35.

My wife, who is an out-patient at Joburg General testified that she found the staff at Tembisa to be more kind and with no attitude as against the General.

Why, I ask, did I not receive any medication at Carstenhof after paying over R2 100? Why the insistence on ICU when Tembisa did not see the need for it? I have learnt my lesson.

I found the ward at Tembisa to be clean with an army of young interns busy under the guidance of more senior doctors. Government is responsible for the facilities and it us unfair to attack the staff for the place in which they work.

Tembisa does need a major renovation. For many of us, Tembisa is all we have and I would like to see a group of businessmen pay a little every month towards a budget that can be used to spruce up the place.

We have doctors in private hospitals who mess up surgeries. Little is said about them nor the hospitals, yet Tembisa is highlighted almost as if it is the only hospital in the country where mistakes happen.