Key staffing positions at the Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital’s cath lab are finally being filled.
This comes as a new cath lab unit arrived at Port Elizabeth’s Provincial Hospital on Monday.
Since October 2018, the Provincial Hospital facility in Port Elizabeth, the only operational cath lab in the Eastern Cape, has been broken beyond repair, causing panic among patients requiring urgent care.
The cath lab at Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital in Mthatha is fully equipped, but there have been no staff to run it properly.
A cath lab performs non-invasive procedures to fit stents to open blocked arteries, fix arteries, fix congenital heart defects and do some vascular procedures. On Sunday, television series Carte Blanche carried an insert on the possible consequences of not having a working cath lab in the province. These include patients having to travel to Cape Town and other centres for essential procedures and the risks posed to children with congenital heart disease.
But in response to the Daily Dispatch on Tuesday, provincial health department spokesperson Lwandile Sicwetsha said a new cath lab unit, “deploying the latest technology in the field”, had been delivered to Provincial Hospital on Monday. One of the great frustrations has been the cath lab at Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital
In theory, the R28m cath lab, opened in 2017, meant that thousands of people from the former Transkei would no longer have to travel to the country’s larger centres to undergo procedures.
But despite having a fully kitted-out cardiology unit and specialised cath lab equipment, these have not been utilised due to no one being available to operate them.
According to both Sicwetsha and Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital chief executive Nomalanga Makwedini, that is about to change.
“We are pleased to report that Mthatha’s team successfully completed the trial run where seven to eight patients had interventions done in the Mthatha cath lab in partnership with a team from Groote Schuur Hospital [Cape Town].”
Hospital management was completing the recruitment of the remaining members of the cath lab team, including a paediatric cardiologist to join the adult cardiologist, a cardiothoracic surgeon, medical technologist, radiographer and nurses.
“The intention is to have the Mthatha cath lab move beyond the basic cardiac procedures to managing the more complex cardiac interventions from April 1 onwards. They will do so in collaboration with the PE and EL cardiology teams,” Sicwetsha said.
Asked why there had been so many issues with staffing at Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital, Sicwetsha said institutions falling under the former Transkei were paying the price for being neglected under apartheid.
“The cath lab service is thus a new service, and is part of developing Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital into a fully-fledged central hospital for the province,” he said.
“We now have our own paediatric cardiologist who arrived in January, as well as a paediatric-trained nurse,” she said.
Sicwetsha said since the Port Elizabeth cath lab went out of service, “no deaths have been reported to management”.
johnh@dispatch.co.za..