Goodness gracious me...
What with all this strike action, and starting a new job I have had ZERO time to even log on to the internet...
No wonder I've been mildly depressed!
But I'm back now, so don't worry - more mad medicine to follow....
However, before we reminisce over last week's occurrences, let me first tie up some loose ends.
THE STRIKE:
On Friday last week we decided to call of the nationwide strike. Our fellow doctors who had been fired in Kwa-Zulu Natal were re-instated, and a final offer by the Government was tabled. In lieu of these two facts, and the fact that we had been striking for an entire week, it seemed pointless to continue striking. The government was not prepared to offer any more than a five percent increase in our salaries, and closed the bargaining chamber. We deserved 50 percent. Thus, we unanimously rejected the final offer. We are currently awaiting the arbitration process.
Calling off the strike does not mean we have given up the fight. The government has said nothing about improving working conditions or pumping more money into our failinng health system to improve facilities for our patients.
In fact this is just the beginning...
For the first time in South Africa, doctors across levels of seniority, across institutions and across provinces were united in one cause. We realised for the first time that as a medical fraternity we have the ability to stand up an effect change in our country. Strange that it has taken us doctors, in a country famed for it's constitution and democracy, this long to realise our power.
The other awesome consequence of this strike is that we showed the government what it means to implement a Minimum Service Level Agreement. A doctor's right to strike is enshrined in our constitution - provided we implement a minimum service, and keep emergency centres open. The government promised for two years to define what our minumum service level should be, and of course, never got round to it. So we had to take matters into our own hands. As a result we managed to protest without jeapordising patient care, and nobody died as a direct result of the strike.
OLD JOB:
I never actually had a proper ending to my stint at the day hospital. The last two days there were spent toyi-toying and striking at the great tertiary institution on the mountain, Groote Schuur Hospital. (Site of the very first heart transplant performed by our own Dr Christiaan Barnard.)
So I slipped away, without any fanfare...
Many of the Sisters there noticed me on the news and in the papers - and sent words of encouragement. I miss them already...
NEW JOB:
My new job is in the "front room" ( trauma and casualty unit)of a secondary hospital also on the Cape Flats. This hospital is notorious throughout South Africa for being impossibly overwhelmed with patients. I remember it from my student days...patients lying on the floor, staff overworked, no facilities, patients sitting in the corner of the unit - for hours, and eventually dying there, unseen.
This hospital, had a drainage area of 7/8 of our entire metro district. The other many hospitals in our metro SHARED the remaining 1/8 between them. And this hospital was slapped with the task of treating the rest. Slightly unfair right!? But because of the way the city expanded, with the poorest of the poor shoved out into the periphery- this hospital was the closest beacon of hope in a sea of poverty radiating out around it.
I was expecting to be gobsmacked on my first day - and I was. But for the entirely paradoxical reason that the place was NOTHING like I remembered it. After years of disaster, the hospital management put their feet down and demanded that the drainage areas be changed. As a result - the hospital, while still busy, has a much more manageable patient load. Nobody was lying on the floor, nobody was dying in a corner, and the doctors had smiles on their faces. Incredible!
Thank you work gods!!!!! I must have done something good in a past life to deserve such an unexpected blessing!
My new job also dictates a new kind of lifestyle for me - a SHIFT lifestyle. I have been assigned to a team of doctors. There are 6 teams. Only one team is on per shift. I'm in the first team. Each team consists of an emergency medicine registrar, a medical officer and a community service doctor like myself.
Which means....I'M NOT ALONE ANYMORE!!!!! Yippee! Wherever I turn there are doctors more senior than me to ask for help. This is excellent news.
Our shifts are as follows:
During the week: either 8am-4pm, or 4pm-11pm, or 11pm to 8am the next day.
Over the weekends: 8am to 8pm or 8pm to 8am.
If one is on on the weekend you do the WHOLE weekend - fri, sat and sunday night, or fri, sat, or sunday day.
Often one has days off during the week.
This is fantastic news!
With all these new blessings bestowed upon me, I can only forsee great things for the next six months...
It's only been a week and I 'm loving it!
Showing posts with label the strike. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the strike. Show all posts
Friday, July 10, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
The strike continues...
And so the strike continues...
We are on every tv news broadcast and I made it onto the front pages of two major Cape Town newspapers yesterday, along with some of my fellow strikers.
All the offers for remuneration increases made by our government have been rejected by us, across the board. Why? because it's pretty much exactly the same offer as before. It equates to about R300 extra a month. Our colleagues in Kwazulu-Natal were fired - 300 of them- for striking after they ignored an interdict to go back to work.
The ridiculous thing is that the Department of Health decided to single out individuals who were striking, and did not fire everyone. How did they determine which individuals deserved to be fired when the rest of us were doing exactly the same thing?
The stupidity of it is that they served some doctors with interdicts who weren't even striking! People who had been at work every day during the strike manning the emergency centres they were contracted to work in! Idiots!
All this does is send out a message that we are indispensable. They went on record to say that they will get foreign doctors to work in those posts. If they have the money to pay those doctors their locum rates - why do they not have the money to pay us what we are worth?
Why are they spending millions of rands on their lavish banquets, and birthday parties for the president's daughters - yet cannot afford to pump money into the failing health system? Where are their priorities?
People are berating us for striking. They keep saying people will die because of this strike. The strike has gone on for days and nobody has died yet. Why? Because we are still running emergency services. The doctors from the clinincs are now helping in these centres so there are more doctors focused on the worst cases.
Furthermore, people have DIED way before we were striking. Many died directly as a result of a lack of equipment and lack of adequate staffing. How does one expect one doctor on call for the night to handle three emergencies at once - with many potential emergencies lurking in the waiting room?
People keep saying that as doctors we knew what we were getting in to, and that we have a responsibility towards our patients, that it is illegal for us to strike.
I tell these people that we are not Gods. We are not superheroes. We are NOT saints. We are human beings, we are citizens like the rest of the citizens in this country and we have the SAME constitutional rights. Why is it that we are always the ones being depended on to do the right thing. Is it because we save lives?
Let me tell you something. Every single citizen has the ability to save lives. Feed that child begging at your door. Buy it some shoes and a warm coat in winter. Volunteer your time to go and teach in underprivileged schools. Ask where help is needed and go and provide it. Why is nobody berating YOU for not doing anything? You have NO idea what it means to be poverty stricken, and to be a patient in our state system. Some of these patients, the ones directly affected, SUPPORT us! We are faced, every single day , with the injustices done to our patients by the current health system. We are witnesses to the neglect.
At least we are doing something. And this strike is about so much more than the money. Pay our doctors properly so that they stay in the public sector. If you don't they will leave, and leave us in a worse position than before! We have been picking up the slack for years, stretching ourselves to breaking point to try to maintain a crumbling health system. We are tired of that responsibility - that needs to be shifted onto the shoulders of the Department of Health where it belongs...
We are on every tv news broadcast and I made it onto the front pages of two major Cape Town newspapers yesterday, along with some of my fellow strikers.
All the offers for remuneration increases made by our government have been rejected by us, across the board. Why? because it's pretty much exactly the same offer as before. It equates to about R300 extra a month. Our colleagues in Kwazulu-Natal were fired - 300 of them- for striking after they ignored an interdict to go back to work.
The ridiculous thing is that the Department of Health decided to single out individuals who were striking, and did not fire everyone. How did they determine which individuals deserved to be fired when the rest of us were doing exactly the same thing?
The stupidity of it is that they served some doctors with interdicts who weren't even striking! People who had been at work every day during the strike manning the emergency centres they were contracted to work in! Idiots!
All this does is send out a message that we are indispensable. They went on record to say that they will get foreign doctors to work in those posts. If they have the money to pay those doctors their locum rates - why do they not have the money to pay us what we are worth?
Why are they spending millions of rands on their lavish banquets, and birthday parties for the president's daughters - yet cannot afford to pump money into the failing health system? Where are their priorities?
People are berating us for striking. They keep saying people will die because of this strike. The strike has gone on for days and nobody has died yet. Why? Because we are still running emergency services. The doctors from the clinincs are now helping in these centres so there are more doctors focused on the worst cases.
Furthermore, people have DIED way before we were striking. Many died directly as a result of a lack of equipment and lack of adequate staffing. How does one expect one doctor on call for the night to handle three emergencies at once - with many potential emergencies lurking in the waiting room?
People keep saying that as doctors we knew what we were getting in to, and that we have a responsibility towards our patients, that it is illegal for us to strike.
I tell these people that we are not Gods. We are not superheroes. We are NOT saints. We are human beings, we are citizens like the rest of the citizens in this country and we have the SAME constitutional rights. Why is it that we are always the ones being depended on to do the right thing. Is it because we save lives?
Let me tell you something. Every single citizen has the ability to save lives. Feed that child begging at your door. Buy it some shoes and a warm coat in winter. Volunteer your time to go and teach in underprivileged schools. Ask where help is needed and go and provide it. Why is nobody berating YOU for not doing anything? You have NO idea what it means to be poverty stricken, and to be a patient in our state system. Some of these patients, the ones directly affected, SUPPORT us! We are faced, every single day , with the injustices done to our patients by the current health system. We are witnesses to the neglect.
At least we are doing something. And this strike is about so much more than the money. Pay our doctors properly so that they stay in the public sector. If you don't they will leave, and leave us in a worse position than before! We have been picking up the slack for years, stretching ourselves to breaking point to try to maintain a crumbling health system. We are tired of that responsibility - that needs to be shifted onto the shoulders of the Department of Health where it belongs...
Monday, June 29, 2009
WE'RE ON STRIKE!!!
I never ever thought this day would come...
But if one examines the history of state health service in this country, the current strike was a long time coming.
I have two days left at the Community Health Centre I work at - but I did not go to work there today.
A decision was taken at a meeting on Friday to strike for a better future in state health care, for patients and doctors. The meeting occurred at our tertiary referral centre, and we decided that all day hospitals would close down, and that the state doctors from those centre's would go and help out at their secondary and tertiary referral centres. We decided to keep only the essential services running at these hospitals.
Thus, the Western Cape Province is only running emergency services, like casualties and trauma units, labour wards and ICU, for life-threatening emergencies. All non-essential clinics and elective surgeries have ben cancelled.
Of course, defining what actually constitutes a life-threatening emergency is difficult. Do we stop giving chronic disease patients their antihypertensives? They are not technically an emergency case, but not having their meds might result in an emergency. Do we continue running the anti-retroviral clinics for the HIV patients? It's really hard having to deny patients care in this way. But we are completely fed up, and have no other recourse. The government has exploited our humanity for too long. They know that we will always put ourselves above our patients. But who puts us first?
Why are we actually striking?
We are fed up with the current pathetic state that our Health Care System is in. We are shocked by the government's lack of urgent action to remedy the situation. All of their children and relatives must be using private hospitals. Nobody in a position to change things could just stand by if they knew exactly what was going on at the state hospitals.
We are saddened that we cannot provide the quality of health care we know we are capable of due to the fact that our resources are so limited. Some hospitals do not have sterile gowns in the operating theatre. I have often had to man the trauma unit without an ECG machine or an oxygen saturation monitor. I have colleagues, at my level, working up-country who have to do three jobs at once. And by that I mean: Putting the spinal anaesthetic into the pregnant patient themselves and making sure she is stable - then scrubbing up and performing the caesarian section themselves - then resuscitating the child after delivery - then rescrubbing to close up the wound from the caesar-then monitoring the patient in the recovery room. They're supposed to be working as COSMO's ( community service medical officers) like me - instead they are the anesthetist, paediatrician and obstetrician all at the same time! IT'S RIDICULOUS! And dangerous. And unfair to the patients.
Furthemore - we are insulted by our current salaries. Compared to other government employees - Dr's are undepaid by up to 50 percent. This is not a comparison between South Africa and other countries - this is a comparison with our OWN government employees. A judge at the highest level gets paid 50 percent more than a chief medical specialist. Despite that medical specialist having worked longer hours, and trained for longer. A bus driver's basic salary is the same as an medical intern's basic salary without overtime. How does this make any sense?
We are striking for an increase in our wages to ensure that our doctor's stay in this country we love, and not be forced to move overseas due to better working conditions there and greater financial reward.
The government was supposed to implement the wage increase last year in June 2008. But since then, nothing has been done about it. The strike, started in Kwazulu-Natal Province, forced the Government to begin talking about our wages again, and begin implementing them. Recently the government thought they were clever, and presented us with an offer - claiming that they had increased our salary by 30 percent. But it was nonsense.All that they did was collapse our rural allowances, scarce skills pay and overtime into our basic salary. The actual increase worked out, for some of us - in the region of an extra R300 a month.
I was one of only two doctor's from our community health centre who decided to strike today. The rest don't seem to be interested. And my clinic ran as usual today with no change. Perhaps they feel that things are running smoothly. Perhaps they have been suffering too long to stand up for change. I'm not sure. Perhaps they just can't leave the patients. All I know is what I've experienced and what I've experienced has been shocking.
I might get into a lot of trouble for staying away, I might not. I don't know. But someone has to do something.
So today about 300 of us from hospitals around the city, toyi-toyi'd and marched and sang. All the media were there. It was hectic.
I am seriously frightened for the future of health care in this country - it's stressing me out.
I start as a medical officer in the trauma/casualty department of a secondary hospital on the flats on Wednesday. As this falls under emergency services I will definitely be going to work then....
We'll see what the future brings...the bargaining chamber is still hot with discussions as to what the Department of Health should offer us... so far what they've offered has been akin to a slap in the face.
But if one examines the history of state health service in this country, the current strike was a long time coming.
I have two days left at the Community Health Centre I work at - but I did not go to work there today.
A decision was taken at a meeting on Friday to strike for a better future in state health care, for patients and doctors. The meeting occurred at our tertiary referral centre, and we decided that all day hospitals would close down, and that the state doctors from those centre's would go and help out at their secondary and tertiary referral centres. We decided to keep only the essential services running at these hospitals.
Thus, the Western Cape Province is only running emergency services, like casualties and trauma units, labour wards and ICU, for life-threatening emergencies. All non-essential clinics and elective surgeries have ben cancelled.
Of course, defining what actually constitutes a life-threatening emergency is difficult. Do we stop giving chronic disease patients their antihypertensives? They are not technically an emergency case, but not having their meds might result in an emergency. Do we continue running the anti-retroviral clinics for the HIV patients? It's really hard having to deny patients care in this way. But we are completely fed up, and have no other recourse. The government has exploited our humanity for too long. They know that we will always put ourselves above our patients. But who puts us first?
Why are we actually striking?
We are fed up with the current pathetic state that our Health Care System is in. We are shocked by the government's lack of urgent action to remedy the situation. All of their children and relatives must be using private hospitals. Nobody in a position to change things could just stand by if they knew exactly what was going on at the state hospitals.
We are saddened that we cannot provide the quality of health care we know we are capable of due to the fact that our resources are so limited. Some hospitals do not have sterile gowns in the operating theatre. I have often had to man the trauma unit without an ECG machine or an oxygen saturation monitor. I have colleagues, at my level, working up-country who have to do three jobs at once. And by that I mean: Putting the spinal anaesthetic into the pregnant patient themselves and making sure she is stable - then scrubbing up and performing the caesarian section themselves - then resuscitating the child after delivery - then rescrubbing to close up the wound from the caesar-then monitoring the patient in the recovery room. They're supposed to be working as COSMO's ( community service medical officers) like me - instead they are the anesthetist, paediatrician and obstetrician all at the same time! IT'S RIDICULOUS! And dangerous. And unfair to the patients.
Furthemore - we are insulted by our current salaries. Compared to other government employees - Dr's are undepaid by up to 50 percent. This is not a comparison between South Africa and other countries - this is a comparison with our OWN government employees. A judge at the highest level gets paid 50 percent more than a chief medical specialist. Despite that medical specialist having worked longer hours, and trained for longer. A bus driver's basic salary is the same as an medical intern's basic salary without overtime. How does this make any sense?
We are striking for an increase in our wages to ensure that our doctor's stay in this country we love, and not be forced to move overseas due to better working conditions there and greater financial reward.
The government was supposed to implement the wage increase last year in June 2008. But since then, nothing has been done about it. The strike, started in Kwazulu-Natal Province, forced the Government to begin talking about our wages again, and begin implementing them. Recently the government thought they were clever, and presented us with an offer - claiming that they had increased our salary by 30 percent. But it was nonsense.All that they did was collapse our rural allowances, scarce skills pay and overtime into our basic salary. The actual increase worked out, for some of us - in the region of an extra R300 a month.
I was one of only two doctor's from our community health centre who decided to strike today. The rest don't seem to be interested. And my clinic ran as usual today with no change. Perhaps they feel that things are running smoothly. Perhaps they have been suffering too long to stand up for change. I'm not sure. Perhaps they just can't leave the patients. All I know is what I've experienced and what I've experienced has been shocking.
I might get into a lot of trouble for staying away, I might not. I don't know. But someone has to do something.
So today about 300 of us from hospitals around the city, toyi-toyi'd and marched and sang. All the media were there. It was hectic.
I am seriously frightened for the future of health care in this country - it's stressing me out.
I start as a medical officer in the trauma/casualty department of a secondary hospital on the flats on Wednesday. As this falls under emergency services I will definitely be going to work then....
We'll see what the future brings...the bargaining chamber is still hot with discussions as to what the Department of Health should offer us... so far what they've offered has been akin to a slap in the face.
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