Unpaid bills put lives in danger

Public hospitals in Gauteng are on the brink of paralysis as medical supply companies, owed hundreds of millions of rands by the province's health department, halt their deliveries.

Forty medical equipment and device suppliers are owed more than R300-million in unpaid bills dating back to 2005. One company alone is owed R50-million.

Some of the companies have stopped supplying and others have stopped servicing equipment until they are paid, leaving many patients in danger.

The chairman of the SA Medical Device Industry Association, Marlon Burgess, said a cardiac ultrasound machine in the cardiology unit of Soweto's Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital had not been serviced by a company the department has not paid. The machine is used to diagnose rheumatic fever and other heart diseases.

And at the Germiston, Tembisa, Far East Rand, Tambo Memorial and Pholosong hospitals, there are few or no diabetes-testing kits because the supplier has stopped delivering haemoglobin and glucose testing devices until it is paid.

The association's chief operating officer, Tanya Vogt, said that two cancer-screening machines at Johannesburg's Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital had "definitely stopped" working because radiology equipment and CT scanners had not been serviced by unpaid maintenance contractors.

A supplier, who spoke on condition of anonymity, who provides surgical screws and pins used in orthopaedic surgery, said: "Some patients requiring urgent trauma surgery have not been operated on timeously because the availability of implants has been negatively affected."

An orthopaedic surgeon at an academic hospital in Gauteng, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "Frequently, things don't get paid for so we just don't have them and have to do without them.

"People come to us for help and we cannot provide them with that help."

The surgeon said that if her unit ran out of supplies, she would have no choice but to "make another plan, choose a sub-optimal procedure" or worse still, "elective surgeries just get cancelled".

Burgess said that companies had tried to resolve the payment problems "on their own" to no avail.

"Invoices have been lost, excuses have been made, calls have not been returned, e-mails have not been replied to," he said.

One company told the association that it had dealt with 18 officials in its attempt to get its money but had "no feedback, no concrete answers" and, at best, "fractional sporadic payments".

Marius Malherbe, head of the Medical Device Industry Association's government procurement team, established to chase up unpaid bills, said that MEC Ntombi Mekgwe's staff told him that, at halfway through their financial year, they had already spent 52% of their budget and were having "cash-flow problems".

But Fidel Hadebe, spokesman for Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi, said: "There's absolutely no point in making the budget look good when you have not paid suppliers."

Mekgwe said: " The department of finance is working on it. "