MyPE

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Posers – 1, Essential Medical Equipment – 0

By

Dear Editor

While hospitals and clinics across the province have run out of critical medical supplies, the Eastern Cape Department of Health (ECDOH) is now seemingly prioritising a vanity project above providing crucial medical treatment and saving lives.

The Director of Communication in the ECDOH has requested the Supply Chain section to tender for the printing and framing of 600 photos of politicians to be placed in departments and health facilities across the province. This could possibly run into the hundreds of thousands of rands, while our hospitals have stock-outs of critical medical supplies such as syringes, needles, sterile gloves, gauze, oxygen masks and oxygen regulators. This is a disgrace!

This callous request for wasteful expenditure on photographs of politicians while our hospitals are collapsing is a stark reminder of just how far-removed the health department is from the myriad challenges faced by nurses, doctors and especially patients in our province.

It is a further reminder that cadre deployment nurtures officials who deem it more important to curry favour with senior politicians by hanging their photos instead of channelling much needed funds to address the critical medication and medical equipment shortages in our crippled clinics and hospitals.

I will set a parliamentary question to establish just how much the tender to put up 600 photos across the province will cost this factually bankrupt department.

Furthermore, I will also be writing to the Chairperson of the Health Portfolio Committee, requesting her to invite the ECDOH to appear in front of the committee to discuss the prioritisation of departmental spending. Prioritising vanity projects while the department is suffering critical shortages and our people are dying, raises serious concerns.

Shortages of basic but crucial medical equipment result in unnecessary delays in surgeries, which further burdens cash flow in the department.

It is therefore unfathomable that a senior director, who should have a very good grasp of the dire financial position of the Eastern Cape Department of Health, can even consider spending much needed monies on 600 photos.

This tender will not add any value whatsoever to health outcomes in the province – in fact this wasteful expenditure will further deplete much needed funds which could be re-channelled to pay service providers and suppliers of crucial medical equipment, some of whom have not been paid in more than a year.

For as long as this provincial government employs incompetent cadres who allow photos to take precedence over effective healthcare, the people of this province will continue to suffer.

Regards

Jane Cowley MPL
Member of the EC Provincial Legislature

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