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Groote Schuur hospital
One of the foremost liver transplant training units in South Africa has received a much-needed upgrade. This amidst serious budget cuts with health and education hit the hardest. Aid organisation, Gift of the Givers assisted to revamp the unit at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town.
The liver unit cares for around 4 000 patients every year. The last time the unit was upgraded was 30 years ago. Now, for the first time, both treatment and training will be done from one space.
“We need to be able to provide services that actually ensure the dignity of our patients and really our clinic has become really run down, even I used to shut my eyes and think, well, in providing expertise, but we need to really upgrade it. Remember many of our patients come here 6 o’clock in the morning, they wait for many hours to be seen. So, this is really just a wonderful environment to actually be seen. And importantly for our doctors, we really work the whole day, don’t take tea or lunch, and so this is really a fantastic environment for our patients and our doctors. And I think the other important thing is that we’re going to be able to consolidate our clinical services looking after our patients, with our training services as well,” says Prof Wendy Spearman, Consultant Hepatologist the hospital.
With its large network of buildings, Groote Schuur Hospital is in constant need of important maintenance. But with hundreds of millions of rands in budget cuts, tough decisions have to be taken.
“Buildings are an essential part of how patients feel respected and cared for in a dignified manner. And so, when we have budget cuts, inevitably what happens is we sacrifice looking after buildings in order to look after the patients. And so, for a company and an organisation, like both the Elma Foundation and Gift to the Givers, to be able to invest in our buildings so that patients can feel the care that they’re receiving is incredible, and we are at Groote Schuur especially it’s a 90-year-old building,” says the hospital’s CEO Dr Shaheem de Vries.
Gift of the Givers has embarked on a drive to support healthcare facilities, with a number of projects across the country to upgrade aging infrastructure. It is calling on all who are able to, to assist the public healthcare system.
“There’s so much of hardship out there. If you look at a simple like cataracts, we involved in cataract catch up. There’s tens of thousands of patients waiting. Some of them haven’t seen for eight years, can imagine what productivity, what they will be if everybody can see again and the procedure takes eight minutes. We funded the catch up in Eerste River, it’s wiped out. We funded the catch up in Victoria, which is done in Eerste River and it’s wiped out, in Touws River we funded the catch up, it’s wiped out. In Durban Hospital, it’s wiped out. We now busy in Port Shepstone hospitals and many other hospitals have called. So, yes, we need private sector intervention in catch up surgery in equipment in consumables, in infrastructure, and in every way that we can assist,” says Dr Imtiaz Sooliman of Gift of the Givers.
Patients from across the country and even the continent are referred to the unit for medical care. It will be equipped and operational soon.
