Haunted hospital: Soweto's Baragwanath during the strike (Feature)

By Clare Byrne Aug 30, 2010, 3:06 GMT

Soweto, South Africa - The admissions ward at the sprawling brown-brick hospital in South Africa's Soweto township usually has the air of a disaster zone, with around 120 patients on any given day waiting on stretchers.

But a second week into a crippling public sector strike that has seen nurses desert their stations en masse, the number of patients in an eerily calm Ward 20 at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital had fallen to around 30.

The largest hospital in the southern hemisphere, and the only one for Soweto's estimated 2 million residents, is being forced to patch up and send on their way all but the most critical.

'You can't just admit patients anymore. You have to determine whether it's life or death,' a doctor in the casualty department, who did not wish to be named, told the German Press Agency dpa.

On Saturday evening, the 2,900-bed hospital, where European army doctors come to train in trauma surgery, was, as usual, bombarded with victims of accidents and assaults.

But most other parts of hospital were ghostly quiet.

Half the general wards at Baragwanath have been closed and the patients either discharged or aggregated in other wards, for lack of nurses.

Babies in the intensive care unit have been transferred to other hospitals. The few nurses who have been coming to work - mostly from casualty - have to run a gauntlet of striking workers, who intimidate and attack so-called 'scab' workers.

'They say 'we will get someone you don't know to attack you. They can even burn your house,' one terrified head nurse, who remained at work and did not wish to be named, said.

Although the intimidation has abated since the army was scrambled to secure hospitals and generally help out, the nurse said strikers were still attempting to close down intensive care and paediatrics.

'They say 'these patients must die. That's the only way the government will take notice.''

Nearly public sector workers have been holding out for 8.6 per cent more pay since July 18. The strike follows weeks of wage talks between unions representing 1.3 million public servants and the state, which ended with only 1.5 per cent and 300 rands of a housing allowance in the difference.

While schoolchildren miss out on two weeks of tuition it is the sick who are suffering the most. In several cases, ambulances have been turned away from hospital gates by picketing workers, causing several fatalities, including a two-year-old girl in KwaZulu-Natal province.

Less visible are those patients who are quietly wasting away at home.

Since the beginning of the strike, thousands of AIDS, tuberculosis, hypertension and diabetes patients who collect live- saving medication at Baragwanath haven't been showing up and numbers attending outpatients' clinics, including cancer patients, have also dwindled to a trickle.

'And if they're not coming here they're not being seen anywhere (in Soweto),' he said. 'Which means they're staying at home and some are dying at home,' a community doctor who works at Baragwanath, and who is barred from speaking to the media, told dpa.

The situation is replicated at hospitals across Johannesburg and Durban, the two worst-hit of the large cities. At Helen Joseph Hospital in central Johannesburg this week, the AIDS testing clinics was virtually empty, leaving non-striking staff there twiddling their thumbs.

Many South Africans have expressed danger at the workers' militancy, accusing them of lacking feeling towards their charges and of being ungrateful for having a job - even if many earn less than 1,000 dollars a month - given unemployment of at least 25 per cent.

But others, like the South African Medical Association, a doctor's group, blame the government for failing to nail down an agreement on minimum service levels years ago.

'As SAMA, we therefore place the blame for loss of life and patient harm suffered by the most vulnerable in our society, the poor, squarely at the door of Government,' the association said Thursday.

With the 2-million-strong Congress of South African Trade Unions threatening a secondary strike this week that could shut down mining and manufacturing, pressure is building on President Jacob Zuma's government to accede to the strikers' demands.

'They're just 1 percentage short and they're letting people die,'said Patience Shabangu, who was waiting at Baragwanath for a doctor to treat her 19-year-old daughter's neck injury, said. 'I think government must just give them the money they're asking,'