‘Govt must pay for deaths’: Staff can’t resuscitate all patients when lights go out

The Health and Allied Workers Indaba Trade Union (Haitu) said the lack of energy was a matter of life or death and called on the government to compensate families for unnecessary deaths caused by load shedding in hospitals.

Haitu president Rich Sicina also said it was concerned about the rapid deterioration of health standards caused by rolling blackouts and water shortages in all public health facilities.

Load shedding at hospitals

Sicina said only 77 hospitals were exempt from load shedding, out of 400 public healthcare facilities in the entire country.

“It is a disgrace that the government has allowed Eskom to collapse to this point, forcing healthcare workers to operate under such strenuous conditions.”

Sicina said it was shameful that the government was so complacent about ending load shedding that resulted in scores of unnecessary deaths in state hospitals.

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Patients depend on equipment

“Every day Haitu received reports from nurses on the ground regarding shocking conditions they were forced to endure because of water and power shortages.

“Nurses and doctors are forced to make terrible choices over who lives and dies, simply because if the power cuts and the ventilators cut out.

“There is not enough staff to resuscitate all the patients who depend on life-saving equipment,” he said.

Public hospitals at risk

Sicina said if load shedding affected private healthcare facilities the way it affected public hospitals, a solution would have been found by now.

“We have noted how this selfish government has responded to business by promising to compensate them for their financial losses, caused by load shedding,” he said.

Haitu also called on the national department of health to record daily reports on the number of patients that die due to load shedding.

Sicina said the department should make those reports available to the public.

Slugging government response

Haitu planned to file evidence at court later this month of the impact of load shedding on the healthcare system and how it was destroying public health.

It will also join the various protests and shutdowns against load shedding.

“The lack of reliable energy is a matter of life and death, and we are fed up with the sluggish response from the government, in the face of the biggest disaster, since the Covid pandemic hit our shores,” Sicina said.

Hospitals don’t have generators; ministers do

Head of Ezintsha at the University of the Witwatersrand professor Francois Venter agreed with the union that the government was to blame for many deaths.

Venter said it was sadly hard to prove it.

“It is completely immoral that government hospitals do not have working generators or clean water, while government ministers do,” he said.

Load shedding a ‘human rights violation’

Democratic Alliance (DA) Gauteng shadow MEC Health Jack Bloom said it was horrifying that medical staff had to choose who got to live and who had to die.

“If people die of power failures it was a human rights violation. It was shocking that half of the hospitals in Gauteng were exempted from load shedding,” he said.

Bloom said it was a form of medical negligence.

“Generators only partially compensated because batteries run out.”

Bloom said he wasn’t sure how such a case would work because South Africa didn’t have a history of this type of class action.

He said estimating compensation for someone’s life was hard.

“How do you put a price on somebody’s life,” he asked.