Hospital also needed for ordinary folk

I LOVE my town and I’m grateful for any kind of progress being made here.

I read two more private hospitals are on the cards, as reported in the ZO of 15 January.

Who are these hospitals for? Here I include the existing ones such as The Bay, the Garden Clinic and the new one in the making at the new office park on the John Ross Parkway.

I’ll tell you one thing, they are not for me. They never will be for me and for the thousands of other people in the uThungulu district.

This is because medical care offered by these sort of institutions is only for the rich.

This is not a new matter, it is a problem that is systematically and literally killing us in South Africa.

Yes, Richards Bay is a growing town and there are large industries and many very well off individuals.

So by the end of 2017 there will be five private hospitals between Empangeni and Richards Bay, and just one tucked away in the hills of Ngwelezane for the rest of us.

Who’s needs are you trying to fulfil here? Did KZN Health ever ask us what we need in terms of medical facilities.

The answer certainly wouldn’t be another private medical facility squashed between two buildings, carrying state-of-the-art facilities that most of us can only stare at in wonderment.

We pay for medical aid, thousands of rands every month, because it’s the responsible thing to do, but we take packages that we can afford and those are never good enough.

Flashing a medical aid card can get a private hospital to stop for just long enough to determine that there will so much more other costs that you will need to fork out cash for.

I’m not trying to bash medical aids here, I’m trying to get you to understand our plight.

What we really need is another government hospital, or better still a huge cash injection into the beloved Ngwelezana Hospital that has been servicing the thousands of needy residents of the district.

We need that hospital completely revamped, we need the roads to the hospital improved and we need a dedicated transport system in place to get us there.

We need much more qualified staff, state-of-the-art equipment and facilities and they need to be available to everyone.

I’m gravely concerned for the future of the rest of us who live and work here on the factory floors and elsewhere. Count us, we are here and we are in the thousands.

We don’t want another private hospital, we want KZN Health to bring a Ngwelezana facility closer to everyone.

JEANNE HARICHURAN