Angels of mercy with patients in firing line

"Minister, if it were not for you, I would have been in trouble." These were the words of a car accident victim to Minister of Health Aaron Motsoaledi on Friday night.

Amid the devastating countrywide civil service strike, Motsoaledi worked alongside 11 other doctors and nurses who defied their colleagues and death threats by reporting for duty at Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital.

"They were getting threats throughout the night, telling them, 'We know where you stay, we know who you are - and we are going to fix you,'" Motsoaledi told the Sunday Times yesterday.

"My heroes were the doctors and the nurses. The nurses said they couldn't find it in themselves to leave their patients. I saw the fierce determination from the nurses, and it humbled me," he said.

Gauteng hospitals, including Charlotte Maxexe, Natalspruit and Helen Joseph, were hit hardest.

Motsoaledi criticised the conduct of strikers, including student nurses, toyi-toying in a sterile area in a Chris Hani-Baragwanath operating theatre this week. "A sterile area is out of bounds to those who are not wearing sterile clothes. It's a place that's sterilised because you are going to open up somebody, and you don't want any germs to escape and move in."

Motsoaledi said he was appalled by an incident at another Johannesburg hospital where striking workers interfered with an operation on a patient under anaesthetic. "In other words, they were saying, 'Leave this one to die.' This is murder."

He said his department would immediately dismiss those workers if they could be identified. "You can't have a health worker who is also a killer. A health worker, by definition, must be a person with a very deep conscience who, regardless of how he feels, will never arrive at a decision where they are prepared to kill a human being."

He said it was very difficult to say how many health workers were on strike. Many doctors were also doubling up as nurses.

Motsoaledi led a team of 20 volunteers yesterday to assist at the George Mukhari Hospital in Garankuwa, outside Pretoria, before returning to Chris Hani-Baragwanath for another shift last night.

He said there were several threats to close the 2888-bed hospital, but the government would never allow that to happen.

"We will defend it with our own lives, if possible," he said.

Gauteng health MEC Qedani Mahlangu assisted by changing bedsheets and clearing up rubbish at Natalspruit Hospital in Katlehong, one of the worst-hit hospitals in the province.

At least 53 tiny, critically ill premature babies were taken from the hospital on Wednesday night by a team of Netcare paramedics to two private hospitals in Johannesburg.

The starving babies had not been fed the whole day.

Scenes of miraculous births of babies outside hospital gates in the face of stubborn resistance from nurses played out around the country. A woman in labour turned away from a government hospital in Durban was forced to give birth in the parking lot of a private hospital on Friday morning.

A passing motorist drove the woman to Netcare's St Augustine's Hospital after she found the gates at a strike-hit state hospital closed. But the woman did not make it to the delivery room and had to give birth in the back seat of the car.

More than 20 children in Johannesburg's Rahima Moosa Hospital's paediatric ward were discharged on Thursday and Friday amid mounting fears that they would not get food and medication.

A doctor at King George V Hospital in Durban said a group of strikers went on the rampage this week, dragging working nurses and staff from the wards. She said some nurses hid under beds and desks as strikers stormed the hospital.

"We're operating with a skeleton staff. Our biggest concern is the TB section, where patients cannot be discharged and need care," she said.

"Even the pharmacy has been shut down, and we had to work under cover with pharmacy staff to get access to medication."

East London general practitioner Dr Helmut Fritsche said minimal disruptions had taken place at hospitals in East London.

However, nurses at the Bityi Clinic in Umtata and at Umtata General Hospital experienced serious intimidation on Friday.