Publications
Partners
Members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) celebrated International Day for Decent Work by marching to Gate Way Clinic in Mthatha, where they handed over a petition to the MEC for the Department of Health, Nomakhosazana Meth, demanding security, recently.
COSATU secretary of the OR Tambo Region, Pumla Mzantsi, said in February this year that members of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) had hosted a march where they were launching a Public Service Delivery Campaign, and called on Meth to give her their grievances.
Mzantsi indicated that NEHAWU members said that this department was in a bad situation. According to her, they complained about the shortage of workers, lack of resources, and lack of safety in hospitals and clinics.
“Today we are looking at the decent work, since members of COSATU decided to intervene in those grievances.
“They then identified Gate Way Clinic in Mthatha, as the reason for that was it has long queues. One of the challenges is that this clinic has only one computer.
“We also had negotiations about the Mqhekezweni clinic that was shut down recently because nurses felt unsafe due to the demands that were made by some of the residents,” said Mzantsi.
She said that they also wanted Meth to speed up the process of National Health Insurance (NHI) because the OR Tambo Region was identified as the pilot, and now it is in an implementation process.
Mzantsi said that they wanted to see the progress in this process before April next year.
She added that the National Health Act (NHA) made it clear that the hospitals and clinics should be of a good standard. According to her, they saw that the Gate Way Clinic was still far from reaching that standard.
“We want it to be changed to a Health Centre so that it can operate 24 hours, because it is servicing a lot of community members.
“Some of our demands re also that Mthatha West should have its own clinic, because we used to have an SOS Clinic that was also closed. If we are going to implement NHI there must be a direction. We want to have panic buttons and, CCTV, as well as security in our clinics. For instance, at Zithulele Hospital in Mqanduli, nurses were murdered. In Mqhekezweni and in Mbekweni Clinic in Mthatha, two nurses were raped in different incidents. Our workers must work in a good environment.”
Meth said that they were aware of the situation, but the budget will not allow them to do everything at once.
“We are aware of your grievances, and we are making sure that we do all that we can to solve those issues.
“The problem is the budget that we have; it does not allow us to solve these issues at once,” said Meth.
