Day 9, I had never intended to blog everyday, mainly because I thought there wouldn’t be enough to say, I’m sure things will change but right now I feel there is so much I want to write down.
Today was completely Hinsane! Let me give a little background, the World Cup in South Africa generated a lot of money and was a great success, but the people at the coal face, the public servants, have not benefitted from all this investment. As such pay rises have not been to their liking and there is industrial action all over the province. Hospitals, schools and other public offices are facing strikes up and down the country.
We had heard murmurs of strikes and stories of it elsewhere but today it arrived at Mseleni. The news filtered through and I could hearing singing and vuvuzelas at the hospital gates as I walked to the main hospital. At the doctors morning meeting we found that most of our nursing staff were picketing the gates. People were being organized at the gates and patients and staff alike were not being allowed to come into the compound.
I ventured down to the gates with a colleague and a visiting med student to see for myself, I was keen to take pictures. As we walked down and I was videoing I was told in no uncertain terms to stop so as not to identify those taking part. The scene was part festival part rally. Individuals with microphones were blurting out slogans, while the people sang choral songs and furiously blew at the vuvuzelas.
There was a man standing at the gate who seemed to be marshalling things, he was draped in a banner that said “I support Robert Mugabe”. There was supposedly a man with a club stopping people from coming though I never witnessed this myself. The armed police were however much more visible. As I tried to surreptitiously take a couple more snaps I began to sense it would be safer if I weren’t here, and we retreated back to the barren hospital.
The wards were eerie, one or two nurses at most. We did our best to try and discharge all non critical patients to lighten the load. This included sending home a patient who had a litre of fluid drained from a cavitating chest lesion without a post procedure x-ray. We tried to be as safe as possible but resources being slim meant we triaged much more harshly.
Whatever skeleton staff we had mustered was working all out, doctors helping out making beds, the physios and OTs helping dispense meds and the med students running around as orderlies. A gallows humour was noticeable.
Unfortunately emergencies don’t respect workers rights and there were two on maternity. I got involved in theatre with a post partum haemorrhage. The baby had already been born dead and mum was now bleeding out, her haemoglobin had plummeted as had her platelets. The senior doctor tried to stop the bleeding whilst myself and a colleague tried to gain access to give her plasma. This meant the theatre now housed 5 staff, about a quarter of the whole hospital whilst the strike was still on. We managed to stabilise her and eventually called in the emergency helicopter transport.
We are not sure how long the strikes will continue but what we do know is that there is no money to be given. Things might just start to get interesting!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU4ke34dKWo
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