Doctors’ anguish laid bare in a new local documentary
Relative aims to open people’s eyes about their difficult working conditions
IMAGINE working 30-hour shifts at the forefront of trauma, people’s vulner- abilities, pain and suffering – all while having to remain alert and on peak performance when you yourself are exhausted and frustrated.
This is the daily reality for thousands of junior doctors and it has been captured on film by Francois Wahl, a chartered accountant who has now become a director.
His film Doc-U-Mentally was screened to a sold-out audience at the Jozi Film Festival in Rosebank yesterday.
The 80-minute movie traverses the 30-hour shifts of five doctors, during five various times at public hospitals.
The film is unadulterated, showing the surgeries, gruelling pressure, patients, social ills such as domestic violence and alcohol-induced violence, and the exhaustion the doctors face while working against the clock to save lives.
Wahl said it was coincidental that the film came out in a year that has seen one of the loudest public outcries about the long working hours junior doctors contend with. The uproar was sparked by the death of a junior doctor in the Western Cape in June.
Paarl Hospital intern Ilne Markwat, 25, was driving towards Cape Town on the N1 near Klapmuts around 10am last month when she fell asleep behind the wheel and collided with a bakkie. She, like many of her colleagues, was exhausted after knocking off from a 24-hour shift.
The documentary features Dr Saishrien Rasen in a surgery unit, Dr Yenziwe Ngema in orthopaedics, Dr Wanele Ganya in paediatrics, Dr Amy Salvesen in emergency medicines and Dr Lourens Wahl in casualty.
“We began filming in May last year and finished in June this year,” Wahl said before the screening yesterday.
“This is my first film and this topic is close to home because my wife is a doctor, so is my brother and father. I could see first hand the physical effects the long working hours had on them. That’s why I felt I had to be the one to tell and show the story.”
Wahl said he intended to give viewers a new perspective and felt he had accomplished some of that after a screening in Soweto where a viewer said: “I have so much respect for doctors now.”
The film also shows the realities doctors face when they’ve sustained needle-stick injuries and the psychological toll of the HIV post-exposure prophylaxis treatment.
Maria van Aswegen, spokesperson for Pharma Dynamics, a generic pharmaceutical company and one of the financial supporters of the film, said junior doctors were the hard-working backbone of the health-care system and more should be done to ensure safer working conditions.
“With each passing year, junior doctors are given more responsibility. Working long and anti-social hours causes physical, mental and emotional exhaustion, which often puts doctors and their patients in perilous situations.
“One can understand the anger and frustration felt by many junior doctors at this time. Hopefully the film will encourage other legislatures to follow in the footsteps of Western Cape Health MEC Nomafrench Mbombo, who reduced the working hours of healthcare professionals in the province from 30-hour shifts to 24-hour calls,” she said.
The South African Medical Association and KwaZuluNatal Film Commission also helped fund the film.