THANDI SKADE
FIVE theatre nurses working for the SA National Defence Force have been drafted into Chris Hani-Baragwanath Academic Hospital to help with the growing backlog of elective surgeries in the maternity ward due to a shortage of staff.
They arrived earlier this month, and a source said they would probably stay until the end of March.
The defence force personnel were sent after fed-up doctors at Bara wrote to Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi about an ever increasing elective surgery backlog.
The source said the extra hands provided by the SANDF and 45 community service interns had been a great relief to overworked staff.
Bara CEO Johanna More, denying there was a staff shortage, confirmed that five SANDF personnel had been deployed to the maternity theatre to scrub in for caesarean section procedures, which suddenly spiked late last year. They would remain there “until the peak is over”.
Of the 2 000 babies delivered at the hospital every month, previously 30percent of them were caesarean section births, said More.
Since last month, the demand for c-sections rose to account for about 40 percent of births.
Management had undertaken to investigate the reason behind the sudden increase.
While More maintained there was no staffing problem, hospital staff painted a very different picture.
One nurse said the maternity ward had to be closed for a few hours because 46 women were in the labour ward waiting to deliver, with only one registered nurse to attend to them.
This, she said, happened on several occasions last year and resulted in many patients being diverted from Bara’s maternity ward.
The nurse said the ward needed at least 60 additional professional nurses to function optimally, with a team of eight to 10 nurses a shift as opposed to the four-nurse team a shift that was currently in operation.
“We have a gross shortage of theatre nurses at the hospital and as a result we have an elective surgery backlog,” she said.
Simon Hlungwani, provincial chairman of the Democratic Nursing Organisation of SA (Denosa), said that while he was pleased that hospital management and the Department of Health had been proactive in addressing the problem, the training intake needed to increase as Gauteng was facing a serious shortage of nursing staff, particularly theatre nurses and advanced midwives.
According to the Gauteng Department of Health’s 2010/2011 annual report, there were 902 vacant medical practitioner posts (35 percent), 2 420 vacant professional nursing posts (18 percent) and 1 103 vacant nursing assistant posts (13 percent).
But with nurses and doctors regularly leaving the public health sector to join lucrative private practices and hospitals, SA Medical Association chairman Dr Norman Mabasa said vacancy rates were likely much higher than recorded.
He blamed the shortage of nurses on the government and its “ill advised” decision to close over a hundred nursing colleges more than a decade ago.
While Mabasa welcomed President Jacob Zuma’s decision to reopen 105 nursing colleges, it would be four years before the impact was felt.
The national Department of Health and the SANDF did not respond to questions sent to them at the time of publication.