Doc avoids suspension, bereaved seek answers
Whenever Thembisa Helesi misses her younger sister, actress Zoleka Helesi, she reaches for recordings of Jonas Ngwangwa’s jazz and plays them on repeat.
“She loved jazz music and dancing so much that she’d break into song out of the blue. The flamboyant character people saw on stage was no different from her true personality,” Helesi said this week.
The doctor who performed the operation that allegedly led to Zoleka’s death escaped suspension yesterday at a Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA) hearing in Cape Town.
“On a technicality, Dr Anil Ramdhin is now allowed to continue practising despite his long history of misconduct,” said Dr Caro Nel, a gynaecologist who attended.
Ramdhin has been suspended from the medical roll twice before in SA, and was struck off the British roll in 2006 after the General Medical Council said he had shown “a flagrant disregard for his responsibilities”. He has previously been fined for practising as a gynaecologist when only registered as a general practitioner.
The latest attempt to have him suspended follows a complaint to the HPCSA by Zoleka’s friend, Baxter Theatre CEO Lara Foot. An inquiry has not yet been scheduled and yesterday’s hearing was meant to decide if he should be suspended in the interim. But the HPCSA did not follow the correct procedure in appointing the ad hoc committee and the pro forma complainant.
Zoleka, 48, died in December after complications linked to a hysterectomy at Rondebosch Medical Centre in May. The surgery followed a cervical cancer diagnosis.
According to reports by other doctors, surgery should not be done on stage 4 cervical cancer, and chemotherapy or radiotherapy are the only treatments likely to help.
The complications arising from Ramdhin’s surgery meant Zoleka needed four more operations, and Helesi said: “I watched my sister shifting from her bubbly, full-oflife personality into this downhearted somebody within a short space of time.”
Formerly known as Dr Ganesh Anil Anirudhra, Ramdhin qualified as a gynaecologist in 2019 after a 10-year dispute over his qualifications with Sefako Makgatho Health Science University in Ga-Rankuwa, Gauteng. His precautionary suspension hearing was originally scheduled for February 8, but Ramdhin did not arrive, saying he had been exposed to Covid-19.
Another grieving woman seeking answers is Zainab Ebrahim of Port Elizabeth, whose mother, Beauty Mama, 46, died in September last year, a month after Ramdhin operated on her. He charged the family R50,000 and they had to sell their home to raise the money.
Ebrahim lodged a complaint with the HPCSA after Ramdhin, she said, called her into theatre at Khayelitsha Medical Centre before closing her mother’s abdomen. “His exact words were, ‘I don’t like to talk about things you can’t see.’ There were about four people in the room, and there my mother was laying motionless,” said Ebrahim.
When she called Ramdhin with concerns about her mother, she said, he called her a nuisance and blocked her number. A hearing on Mama’s death has been set for March 8.
This week Ramdhin said the media is “vilifying” him. He sent the Sunday Times a copy of a letter of demand he had sent to other media houses that had reported negatively about him.
“You are not allowed to make a story about a patient that has suffered from severe and confidential multifaceted conditions which I cannot disclose to you. You are being extremely selfish to make a story about someone’s grief and bereavement in order to sell a newspaper,” he said.
The Women’s Legal Centre is giving legal advice and assistance during the HPCSA processes to ensure that “the interests of [Foot and Helesi] are respected and protected”.
“This matter implicates the right of access to health care and reproductive health care that is free from violence, and the right to effective redress,” it said.