Cancer patients face long, deadly wait at Charlotte Maxeke

FOR MANY cancer patients in South Africa, Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital is one of their only options.

However, an alarm was raised last week when it was reported that patients are being told they must wait several months for treatment, at times up to two years.

As one of the two central hospitals in the province to offer radiation oncology services, patients flock from around Gauteng and its surrounding provinces – and even surrounding countries – to receive affordable healthcare.

However, at a meeting between hospital management and the South African Human Rights Commission last Thursday, hospital chief executive Gladys Bogoshi reported that waiting times for patients looking for treatment ranged from three months to two years.

According to the report, reviewed by The Star, there are 300 prostate cancer patients who will wait two years for treatment.

In addition, 50 breast cancer patients will wait four to six months, and 150 women suffering with gynaecological cancer will wait three to four months.

These waiting times can be explained in part by a shortage of oncologists, of which there are three when five are needed, and the need to upgrade old machinery.

DA health spokesperson Jack Bloom said while he was glad Bogoshi had released the numbers to the commission, he was worried that these waiting times were life threatening.

“With cancer patients, these delays could cost lives,” Bloom said. “We need to make sure people are getting care as soon as possible.”

However, Bogoshi said the waiting times should not be a cause for alarm.

She said the higher number of prostate and breast cancer patients was actually a good thing, as it meant the hospital was getting more effective at diagnosing patients during routine visits.

She added that waiting times indicated in the report were deceptive because they varied from patient to patient, and that cancer patients were not waiting at home with no medicine or treatment.

One might be on medication while waiting for surgery, or another might be waiting for radiation treatment following surgery, she said.

“I’m not concerned about the waiting times,” Bogoshi said. “There are so many different waiting times for all these types of cancer.

“We gave the overall picture that all of them wait for different things at different times and throughout the whole thing they are receiving treatment.”

The commission’s Buang Jones said they were completing a probe into the hospital following complaints received earlier in the year.

He said that since their visit to the hospital last week, more people had come forward with information “that contradicted the information furnished to the commission”, so they needed to work to verify the information they had received. He said the investigation would include interviews with doctors and a clinical audit.

Though the budget for the hospital has increased steadily over the past few years, Jones said the budget doesn’t put a dent in the costs associated with restoring oncology equipment.

“To replace all oncology equipment they would need more than the budget that has been allocated. Oncology machines are very expensive. We understand that we have a challenge in the country with resource constraints and we have to work within the available budget,” Jones said.

However, Bogoshi said the budget was not a concern and that the hospital had a “very clear” three-year plan to deal with maintenance and replacement of ageing machinery.

She said while machinery is expensive, they would not want to replace it all at once, because it would mean it would all ultimately fail at the same time.

Bogoshi said issues were often not budgetary. For example, she said that when a machine unexpectedly breaks, the time to replace it came not out of a lack of money but out of a delay on the supplying company’s end. She added that they had been searching for doctors to fill the oncology posts for the past three years but could not find people to fill them.

“We have the money (to fill the posts) but radiation oncologists make more money in the private sector, so they don’t want to come to the public sector,” Bogoshi said.

Jones said the commission would release a pronouncement at “the right time” because “we need to conduct a proper analysis to be able to recommend appropriate action to secure the rights of patients and the public at large”.

However, Bloom said action could not be delayed. He said he believed the hospital should contract the private sector to help, provided they found the budget for it.

In 2016, the commission released a scathing report condemning cancer treatment in KwaZulu-Natal after analysing similar complaints.

“We don’t want to have another situation like that happen again in Gauteng,” Jones said.

“We will ensure that the rights of cancer patients are realised.”

Oncologists make more money in private than public hospitals