PICTURE the scene: Patients in beds and wheelchairs lining a pavement on a busy road outside a hospital, evacuated because of a fire somewhere inside. Looming above and behind them is a giant advertising billboard that shouts: ‘Smile’.
And they really were all on ‘candid camera’ as the press was out in force.
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An episode of Grey’s Anatomy being filmed, one might ask? No… a real life drama in Port Shepstone last week.
The caption on the front page of a local newspaper (not the South Coast Herald) read: “Smoke bellowing out of the hospital.”
(Note to that editor: Smoke generally doesn’t make a noise. Even that embarrassing sound sometimes linked to flatulence is not the actual gas, but the air escaping from between one’s cheeks.)
However, we should all be ‘bellowing’ about how this could have happened.
Patients had to be accommodated at other hospitals, some even airlifted, but there were no serious injuries, thank goodness.
There was, of course, the humiliation factor, as nobody would relish the idea of being in the public eye wearing jammies.
The point is that our government hospitals are generally in a terrible state. Maybe our own in Port Shepstone is better than most, but one can’t say the same for many others. Even though billions are pumped into them, horror stories abound.
In Durban, people actually die waiting in queues for vital treatment for dreaded diseases like cancer. The vast majority of nurses at these institutions have probably never heard of Florence Nightingale, as it’s no longer a proud vocation, but just another ‘job’.
This leads one to think that government hospitals will never work. How can they when the ‘shareholders’, us, Joe Public, have no say over how they’re run?
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Like all government institutions in this country, ‘jobs for pals’ is the name of the game and in many cases it’s ‘who you know’ in political circles, instead of ‘what you know’ about doing the actual job.
Again, Port Shepstone is probably luckier than most, but surely there must now be some harsh questions asked about an entire hospital having to be evacuated, apparently because of some minor electrical fault.
The answer lies in more private hospitals, run by professionals whose very livelihoods rely on their performance, medically and administratively.
Rather spend taxes on subsidising poorer patients to go to more of these hospitals than waste on blatantly inefficient institutions where one might end up in a bed in the street or even worse… dead.
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