Patients sleep on hospital benches for days as Public Protector finds five years of broken promises

Patients at Livingstone Hospital in the Eastern Cape are sleeping on cold benches and waiting days for care, and the Public Protector says the problems her office flagged five years ago are still there.

She walked the hospital again this week, her first visit since 2021, and found the same complaints she recorded then. People queue for hours. Beds are short. Space is short. Some patients told her they had gone without help for days at a time, bedding down on the benches between attempts to be seen.

Some of those patients said people had died in the queue before anyone reached them. That account comes from patients themselves and has not been independently confirmed.

The Public Protector said the state of the hospital now requires her office to escalate the matter.

What she found on the walk-through was a hospital that still has no approved organisational structure, five years after her office made signing one a remedial action. An organisational structure sets out the posts a hospital is funded and staffed to fill. Without an approved one, the establishment is unsettled at exactly the point where the pressure is heaviest.

She did not soften the finding. The governance, the leadership and the management of the hospital are the problem, she said, and the passage of five years without the structure being signed off is what convinced her of it.

Her sharpest words were for casualty. That is where the worst of it sits, she said, with people left sitting there for as long as a week before anybody helps them.

The hospital’s chief executive officer confirmed the position. The structure the hospital works to has not been formally approved, the CEO said, and the version in use is a draft that staff are working from in the meantime.

In an exchange during the visit, the Public Protector put the timeline to him directly. In 2021, she said, there was no signed structure. Five years on, she said, there still is not one. The CEO agreed.

The staff are not insulated from any of this. Healthcare workers at the hospital are thin on the ground and frustrated, the Public Protector said, and the shortage is part of what patients are sitting in.

For the people on the benches, the wait has been its own ordeal. One patient said no help came until a doctor told them they would be seen only after three days had passed, and that it was only that morning that staff finally took their name, their vitals and their medical details. Another said even finding food there is difficult, that patients have been sleeping on the benches, and that they have watched people arrive in far better condition than others and then die before anyone got to them. Patients described the experience as painful and humiliating.

The Public Protector’s office will now take the lack of implementation up with the provincial government. The remedial steps her office recommended are the mechanism meant to stop maladministration and to give the hospital’s leadership a direction to work in, and they have not been carried out.

What happens next rests with the Eastern Cape health authorities. The remedial actions remain on the record, the organisational structure remains unsigned, and the patients at Livingstone are still waiting on the benches.

Source: SABC News, Livingstone Hospital | Concerns over poor governance in Eastern Cape Health system