THE Department of Health will lay charges of misconduct against some members of management at Limpopo’s Letaba Hospital following incidents of power outages that contributed to a patient’s death.
Power outages at the hospital in June may have contributed to the death of an extremely ill patient, Department of Health spokesman Joe Maila said on Tuesday.
Hospital management was found to be at fault for not addressing a fault with a hospital circuit breaker. They had initially blamed the loss of power on load shedding, Mr Maila said.
The two-day power outage at the hospital resulted in accusations that between one and three patients on life-support machines had died due to failure of life support machines.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) had subsequently demanded clarity on whether public hospitals had made sufficient preparations for back-up power in the event of load shedding.
The alleged deaths occurred during a power cut because the hospital had run out of diesel to run its back-up generator.
Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi subsequently appointed a high level task team to "investigate allegations of mismanagement, poor service delivery and unacceptable conditions at Letaba Hospital".
On Tuesday Dr Motsoaledi released the report, which the department said will not be made public as it contained private patient records.
The CEO of the hospital was suspended and the report has recommended "that further action be taken", said Mr Maila. This would be in the form of misconduct charges. The power loss could have contributed to the death of at least one of the three patient but this was not necessarily the case, said Mr Maila.
Picture: THINKSTOCK
THE Department of Health will lay charges of misconduct against some members of management at Limpopo’s Letaba Hospital following incidents of power outages that contributed to a patient’s death.
Power outages at the hospital in June may have contributed to the death of an extremely ill patient, Department of Health spokesman Joe Maila said on Tuesday.
Hospital management was found to be at fault for not addressing a fault with a hospital circuit breaker. They had initially blamed the loss of power on load shedding, Mr Maila said.
The two-day power outage at the hospital resulted in accusations that between one and three patients on life-support machines had died due to failure of life support machines.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) had subsequently demanded clarity on whether public hospitals had made sufficient preparations for back-up power in the event of load shedding.
The alleged deaths occurred during a power cut because the hospital had run out of diesel to run its back-up generator.
Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi subsequently appointed a high level task team to "investigate allegations of mismanagement, poor service delivery and unacceptable conditions at Letaba Hospital".
On Tuesday Dr Motsoaledi released the report, which the department said will not be made public as it contained private patient records.
The CEO of the hospital was suspended and the report has recommended "that further action be taken", said Mr Maila. This would be in the form of misconduct charges. The power loss could have contributed to the death of at least one of the three patient but this was not necessarily the case, said Mr Maila.
