Overwhelming worries in health care
AS WE all mourn the untimely passing of world-renowned Professor Bongani Mayosi and the circumstances surrounding his death, we should delve deeper into the insurmountable challenges facing our healthcare system and how it affects patients, families and health professionals.
For a very long time, it has been fashionable for many people to attribute every negative health outcome to the bad uncaring attitude of doctors and nurses.
For anybody to understand how health professionals have been let down by the system, they have to be a member of the medical fraternity and health sector. Very few people join the medical profession for other reasons than to save lives.
This is a highly complex, scientific and very costly entity that can only be effectively managed by people who have the requisite knowledge and skills to meet its challenges; anything less ends up in a disaster.
Following the death of Professor Mayosi, people started coming forward with many other unfortunate untimely deaths, such as those of some anaesthetists. Heart-breaking though it was to learn about the many anaesthetists who have committed suicide, I understand the pressure they have to endure on a daily basis.
The life of each patient they put under anaesthesia depends on them. If a patient dies within the first 24 hours post-operatively, their death is usually classified as anaesthesia-related and they have to account for that. The very nature of their work is taxing emotionally and psychologically. It is crucial that they get the support they need.
Those who know what happens in a theatre tend to worry more about the effects of anaesthesia than the oper- ation itself.
It was for this reason that when I suffered a fracture of the femur in 2014 and the paramedics wanted to know to which hospital I wanted to be taken, I told them, to their surprise, that they should take me to Tembisa Hospital.
I had a medical aid, Gems, but I knew, under the supervision of a certain highly competent consultant anaesthetist there, I would be wheeled out of that theatre alive. Besides, the whole team would be empathetic as I had worked with them for many years.
Imagine a situation where an anaesthetist, after a thorough assessment of a patient’s condition, who might be a high-risk patient, does not get the type of drugs he might have preferred to use for that patient because the hospital has no money to provide them, and he is forced to use the next available drug; he obviously starts the operation a bit apprehensive. These are the problems they are confronted with.
Faulty or lack of equipment, basic things like syringes, masks, linen, oxygen and many other necessities – who would have thought that some hospitals could run out of toilet paper, paper towels and patients having no toiletries? Surgeons operating with blunt instruments? This is unheard of in a normally functioning health system.
The problems are just overwhelming and health professionals will react in different ways to the collapse of everything they believed in.
The government should honour the departed cardiologist with an undertaking to overhaul our health service. Cometh Dube-Makholwa