Patients sleep on chairs

Patients lie on the floor on mattresses, spend nights on chairs or sleep on stretchers in the passages at the Far East Rand Hospital in Springs.

The ageing hospital, which serves the townships of Duduza, KwaThema and Daveyton, has too many patients for its small wards and narrow passages.

Nurses, who feared being named, said the overcrowding made it hard for them to do their jobs.

"It's hard to wash a patient lying on the floor," one nurse said.

Not every ward The Times visited was overcrowded.

But one ward was so full that six extra patients had been squashed into the nurses' tea room. Four sickly women on drips had spent two days and nights sleeping on chairs waiting for a bed.

A nurse said that when staff complained to the management about the shortage of beds and their working conditions, they were told: "Take your bag and go if you don't want to work [here]."

One of the reasons for the shortage of space is that two wards in the decrepit hospital are being renovated.

Gauteng department of health spokesman Simon Zwane appealed to the community to be patient and said it would be unethical to turn the increasing number of patients away.

"Patients admitted to this hospital have grown from around 3300 in March to more than 4000 currently," he said.

Democratic Nursing Union of South Africa spokesman Simphiwe Gada said the union was negotiating with the government to improve conditions.