For three weeks, medical staff and clerks at the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital had to turn away transferred patients or used their own money to buy airtime as the hospital's telephones have broken down because of loadshedding.
Clerks have to use their own phones to make emergency calls to doctors, arrange for transfers and surgeries.
Staffers who spoke to Sowetan on condition of anonymity said in emergency situations they had to scramble among themselves to raise money to buy airtime.
A nurse at the cardiology unit said after having two resuscitations at the hospital, she makes sure she has airtime to contact doctors in case of such emergencies.
“In this unit, time matters. We do not have the time to try see if we can get airtime before calling. Doctors are not stationed here, they do their rounds in other parts of the hospital and we need to be able to call them as quick as possible. A minute late might cost us the life of a patient.
“So with the phones down, we use our own cellphones and airtime to make these calls. When we have a very ill patient whose family we need to contact or a death, we use our own phones to contact the families.”
She said the unit recently had two patients who suffered cardiac arrest and needed urgent help. “We cannot do anything without the doctor, so we had to make a plan and luckily one of us had airtime and managed to call."
Two other nurses who work in the neurology department said they struggled to co-ordinate patient transfers to other units and have, in some instances, used WhatsApp to communicate with their colleagues.
“If you want to check space availability and your colleague doesn’t respond, you would have to walk all the way to the unit to check,” the nurse said.
“We have to make a plan because if something happens to the patient, we have to take responsibility,” the another said.
Administrative staff said casualty and trauma units were a nightmare, with some patients being turned back.
“If a patient had an appointment for a surgery and the doctor suddenly gets a call out to an emergency, we are unable to call [the patient] and reschedule with them and many do not have emails. So they only find out once they arrive here that we cannot help them,” she said.
“We have cases where emergency services bringing in people from other hospitals had to be turned away, either because they could not reach us to check for available space or we could not contact them to inform them about a postponed surgeries.”
“It costs me about R150 a week to make calls and I don’t even get to make all the calls I want to. It’s an administrative nightmare."
Another administrative staffer said the hospital's casualty, which receives patients before they are admitted, said their unit had one cellphone for 20 staffers to share.
“There is often a queue of workers waiting to make phone calls, so I opt to use my cellphone."
Gauteng health department spokesperson Motaletale Modiba said it might take another two weeks before the lines are restored as some parts needed to be imported.
“The service provider responded to a call out and they found the problem to be a faulty power supply module to the PABX (Power Rectifies) system. They repaired electrical cables, however, they needed parts that are sourced from overseas to restore the system. The company gave an estimate of three weeks for sourcing the parts from the date of the order, which was on the 1st August 2022," he said.
"In the meantime the hospital issued a notice to the public and other sister facilities on July 22 2022 providing alternative numbers to be used."
He said four cellphones with data were issued to be used by critical staff and six Telkom phones were given to the hospital, with 20 more expected today.
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