Nurses who ‘refused to treat’ patient reinstated
The Eastern Cape health department has lifted the suspension of five nurses for allegedly refusing to attend to a Covid-19 patient without personal protective equipment (PPE) at Grey Hospital in King William’s Town.
The patient subsequently died.
Khaya Sodidi, provincial secretary of SA’s largest nursing union, the Democratic Nursing Organisation of SA (Denosa), told Business Day on Sunday that the provincial health department had said the nurses were suspended after “refusing” to attend to the patient.
“But we established that the issue was that there were no PPE at the dedicated Covid-19 ward when the patient was admitted. It [PPE] was [withheld] from the nurses by management,” Sodidi said.
“Unfortunately, by the time the PPE was made available to the nurses the patient had died.”
It was decided at a meeting on Friday between Denosa and the department to lift the suspensions.
“The five nurses are going back to work on Monday. The department realised that there were no grounds to suspend the nurses,” said Sodidi.
The Eastern Cape has the country’s third-highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases at 2,569 and has registered 58 deaths up to Saturday, behind the Western Cape and Gauteng.
Eastern Cape health MEC Sindiswa Gomba did not respond to questions sent to her.
Departmental spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo rejected allegations of shortages of PPE, saying the provincial government had an obligation to not send “soldiers into the battlefield without providing them with ammunition.
“We are equally not going to allow a situation where patients are abandoned, neglected or refused help. We are the last line of defence as health workers,” he said. Kupelo said the provincial health department had distributed PPE to all its healthcare facilities.
The Eastern Cape has received 1.5-million masks from the national health department. Another consignment of PPE — which has since been distributed — was sent from the national health department to the province last week, said Kupelo.
On April 23, health minister Zweli Mkhize visited the Nelson Mandela Bay metro, the provincial Covid-19 hotspot, and berated Gomba and the provincial government for handling the coronavirus pandemic in a lax manner.
This prompted Mkhize to send a senior director to lead the tracing, screening and testing teams in the city and help beef up the province’s response to the spread of the disease.
That intervention seemed to have worked, because when Mkhize visited Port Elizabeth again last Thursday, this time accompanied by President Cyril Ramaphosa, they both praised the progress made by the interventions put in place by the national and provincial governments.