'Warm bodyguards' and surveillance cameras rather than security gates; emergency phones that connect automatically to a control centre; fire doors that block smoke and heat and all staff trained in firefighting.
This is how the newly refurbished Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital was described by officials on Monday at the official opening of the new accident and emergency unit.
The development is in line with the phased plan to get the hospital — which serves not only Johannesburg but the entire Gauteng province, other provinces and parts of the Sadc region — up and running again after a devastating fire in April last year that led to its complete closure.
Health minister Joe Phaahla, acting infrastructure and development MEC Jacob Mamabola, health MEC Dr Nomathemba Mokgethi, hospital CEO Gladys Bogoshi and clinical director Dr Jay Punwasi addressed journalists at a walkabout at the casualty section on Monday.
Bogoshi said the hospital, once a huge facility that people could walk through from one side to the other, had now been compartmentalised, with high-risk areas identified and given beefed-up security.
Mambola said reconstruction of the hospital had been done with fire-retardant materials and fire doors capable of isolating sections and containing a blaze long enough for evacuations to be done in an emergency.
Last year’s fire was caused by a blaze in a PPE storage room in the basement parkade which led to the closure of the entire hospital. It had to be rebuilt in accordance with the City of Joburg’s occupational health and safety protocols.
This has meant that all health services offered at the hospital have had to be farmed out to neighbouring facilities — with it having taken well over a year to get the hospital back to “between 75% and 80% capacity”, according to Phaahla.
The accident and emergency facility was scheduled to reopen by the end of April, and the first patients were taken in on May 4 — a group of 15 mental health patients brought across from Helen Joseph Hospital on a pre-arranged transfer. This was to ease the strain on the sister hospital which has been buckling under the increased patient load brought about by the closure of Charlotte Maxeke.
But while the new casualty unit is open, it is not yet able to take emergency walk-ins or ambulance cases because the CT scanning machine was vandalised and the power cables were stolen shortly after the new machine was installed.
A CT scanner is needed in trauma and emergency cases to diagnose injuries and complications ranging from strokes to the damage caused by stabbings and gunshots.
We have agreed to maintain a level of readiness because we are not yet out of the pandemic, but we are well prepared for more Covid emergencies here, because after a weekend we will have an accurate picture of the fifth wave possibility only from Tuesday
— Joe Phaahla, health minister
But Phaahla is confident that improved security, new measures to curb corruption, “competent people with a strong track record” and “vigilance in the workplace with reporting and monitoring being done” will mean that there will be no more cases of theft, corruption or vandalism as the phased reopening remains on track.
“The hospital will be fully restored by the end of next year,” he said.
In addition, he said, Gauteng remains ready and prepared in the face of rising Covid-19 infections in the province.
He said rising infections were being driven by sub-variants of Omnicron. “It’s not a new variant but rather the mutations b.4 and b.5 that have been spread because of the recent long weekends and public holidays that have been driving social and religious gatherings,” Phaahla said.
“We cannot say we are in the fifth wave as the spike we have seen is not as rapid as the Omnicron wave when we had 5,000-6,000 people a day testing positive.”
He said while there had been an increase in hospital admissions, the total for the country was not yet up to 3,000 a day, with between 200 and 300 Covid patients in ICU.
“We have agreed to maintain a level of readiness because we are not yet out of the pandemic, but we are well prepared for more Covid emergencies here, because after a weekend we will have an accurate picture of the fifth wave possibility only from Tuesday.”
Phaahla said that Gauteng had the most infections — recording more than half of the country’s total, with a positivity rate “tipping towards 30%”.
“But we are capable. We have a lot of capacity and there’s not much severity,” he said.
Mokgethi said authorities had been disappointed by the slow uptake of vaccines in the province, but infections were being tracked and vaccine drives would target the worst affected areas.
