Probe into mentally ill deaths sparks horror
Cost-cutting saw 141 patients die ‘in most horrible way’ — away from family, neglected
Weeks of gruelling testimonies at an inquiry in South Africa have tried to answer an unfathomable question — how authorities allowed 141 mentally-ill patients to die after being moved out of a hospital.
The evidence presented has been a litany of neglect, incompetence and cruelty, which lawyer Dirk Groenewald described as “the greatest human rights violation since the dawn of democracy” in South Africa.
Every day, families of the victims have told shocking stories of how their loved ones were taken from the hospital, badly mistreated at unlicensed health facilities and then died.
Starting last February, more than 1,700 patients were rapidly relocated from the Life Esidimeni hospital in Johannesburg to 27 privately run clinics that were unable to care for them.
The Gauteng provincial health department cancelled its contract with Esidimeni as a cost-cutting measure.
“One day my sister went to go see our mother, but was told she was moved. Nobody contacted us,” 24-year-old Boitumelo Mangena told the inquiry in just one of many harrowing personal accounts.
“My brother found her [at a clinic]. She lost a lot of weight. She hadn’t been bathed for a while, I could tell it from the smell. All the patients were getting the same medication but my mum’s meds were very specific to her condition.”
Mangena’s mother, who suffered dementia, died three weeks after being moved from Esidimeni to one clinic and then another in Soweto.
“These people were sent to their death and they died in the most horrible way possible, they were tortured to death.”
An earlier official investigation, which sparked uproar in South Africa, detailed how confused patients were hurriedly removed from the hospital and taken to care centres that were often overcrowded and unheated.
Staff were untrained, the facilities were ill-equipped, and patients were left far from their families, who didn’t know where they were.
‘Herded like goats’
Joseph Maboe, a pastor, told the inquiry that he went to Esidimeni to visit his son Billy, who was epileptic, but found he had already been transferred.
Instead Maboe watched other patients being moved in “big trucks”.
“They were just like goats and sheep taken to an auction,” he said.
Many officials have pointed to former Gauteng health minister Qedani Mahlangu as the chief architect of the botched relocation plan.
Mahlangu has promised to testify at the commission but has not yet been available, saying she is currently studying in London.