Ziwaphi Relentless quest for the truth
The recent outbreak of the Listeriosis virus has claimed the lives of eleven (11) people in the province.
This was announced by the MEC of health, Gillion Mashego during his policy and budget speech at the provincial legislature on Tuesday.
“The province has also reported cases of Listeriosis like other provinces. To date the province has reported 47 cases with 11 deaths,” announced Mashego.
He continued, “In response to the reported cases of Listeriosis, the department is working closely together with other stakeholders such as National Health Laboratory Services and private Health facilities to contain and stop the disease. We have also been issuing alerts to conscientise our communities on how they can prevent the disease.”
Mashego said part of his department’s R13 billion allocation will go towards addressing the shortage of doctors and specialists, improving the district health services and facilities, provincial and tertiary hospital services.
“Our health facilities continue to suffer with shortage of medical doctors, in particular specialists. That is why our journey of head hunting specialists even abroad has not seized.
As a department we always align the health facilities that we built to the number of health personnel required. We do understand that we have serious shortage of staff including doctors, nurses and support staff which we will be appointing in the current financial year,” Mashego announced.
“We will make sure that during this financial year, we continue with the four Morden High Tech hospitals which are Mapulaneng, Middelburg, Mmametlhake and Bethal. We have also set aside an amount of R25 million for the repairs of boilers in all the hospitals. We have further made available an amount of R28 million for the repairs and maintenance of life saving equipments such as generators, autoclaves, theatre air conditioners and many more.
We have further made available an amount of R5 million for installation of boreholes.
Our focus does not only remain on hospitals, but our Primary Health Care facilities are equally important. That is why we are busy with the construction in Oakley, Pankop, Vukuzakhe and Nhlazatshe 6,” he concluded.
