Covid field hospital closes despite R499m upgrade
After a R499m upgrade by the Gauteng health department, the AngloGold Ashanti Covid field hospital on the West Rand has been closed and is being dismantled, having seen just a handful of patients since May.
Gauteng health spokesperson Kwara Kekana confirmed that all movable assets are being removed from the Carletonville facility.
At the end of March, the 20 staff left because there were no patients, said Gauteng health MEC Nomathemba Mokgethi. One suggestion was that the facility be combined with the nearby Carletonville Hospital to provide extra services in the area.
Mokgethi was responding in writing to a query by the DA’s health spokesman, Jack Bloom, and indicated she hadn’t yet decided what the hospital’s future would be.
When Sunday Times visited the hospital on Wednesday, it was closed and the entrance locked.
The facility was handed over to the Gauteng health department on May 14 last year on a three-year lease. The department invested in construction and equipment.
To date, only 147 patients have been treated there, Mokgethi confirmed.
Kekana said that because of a change of scope from the original refurbishment of the 40-bed intensive care unit (ICU) hospital to a repurposed 175-bed ICU hospital, the budget changed from R50m to R588m, of which R499m was spent.
The ballooning cost prompted a probe by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU). Nine senior officials from the departments of health and infrastructure were subsequently suspended following SIU recommendations. The SIU said the civil litigation is before the Special Tribunal.
Wits University’s dean of health, professor Shabir Madhi, said the issue with the hospital was that it was 12km from the nearest community. “It was going to become difficult to use. It’s a state-of-the-art facility but is unlikely to ever be fully used,” he said.
“To repurpose it would require additional money if they were to turn it into a hospice or something like that, because it was built as a high-care facility. It’s poor decisionmaking to decide to build such a facility in such a far-flung area.”
Dr Grant Lindsay, medical consultant for a large opencast mining company in Gauteng, said the hospital was just too far from Johannesburg to ease the burden on facilities taking up slack after a fire closed Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital.
“But if all the medical facilities in Johannesburg were used properly there wouldn’t be such a load on the tertiary hospitals. We’ve seen how many of these built EMS [emergency medical services] facilities [for Covid] stand empty and we’ve seen how many built EMS facilities are mostly incomplete. Every one a massive overspend.
“We put up our own field hospital with nine ICU beds with oxygen and it cost R220,000, so you can see how much of an overspend it was.”
The AngloGold Ashanti Covid field hospital opened last May with only 80 of the 181 beds planned handed over.
“It’s endemic how broken the health-care system is,” Lindsay said. “So many resources wasted, so many capable people not being involved [in the planning].”
He said the Gauteng government could have used the money to build clinics in underserved communities.
“You could build a decent clinic for R5m.
For example, we bought our oxygen concentrators for R7,000 each. The government was paying R65,000 each.”
Chipo Mrara from AngloGold Ashanti said the company, at the government’s request, entered into a six-month lease agreement for two hospitals at no cost. The West Vaal Hospital in Orkney was fully equipped and in use by the North West government in managing its health-care needs.
The AngloGold Ashanti hospital was not equipped as the company had previously donated the equipment to health-care organisations when the company switched to an outsourced health-care model.
“After signing the lease, the Gauteng provincial government embarked on a project to upgrade that facility,” Mrara said.
In February, the company sold its remaining South African portfolio, including healthcare facilities, to the Harmony gold mining company.
Harmony’s Sihle Maake said the company had merely taken the hospital as part of the acquisition of Mponeng in 2020, and honoured the province’s calls for use of mine hospitals during the pandemic. She said the facility had been leased to the department for three years, with an option to extend.