{"id":239160,"date":"2022-10-05T15:18:01","date_gmt":"2022-10-05T13:18:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/nurses-refuse-to-report-for-duty-at-two-clinics-in-motherwell\/"},"modified":"2022-10-05T15:18:01","modified_gmt":"2022-10-05T13:18:01","slug":"nurses-refuse-to-work-at-two-clinics-in-motherwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/nurses-refuse-to-work-at-two-clinics-in-motherwell\/","title":{"rendered":"Nurses refuse to work at two clinics in Motherwell"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/Joseph%20Chirume\/nu10_clinic.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/nurses-refuse-to-work-at-two-clinics-in-motherwell.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Residents of Motherwell, Gqeberha gathered outside the Thanduxolo clinic on Wednesday. They are demanding two clinics which were closed be opened immediately. Photo: Joseph Chirume<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Two clinics in Motherwell, Gqeberha remain closed on Wednesday.<\/li>\n<li>This follows allegations against one of the clinics after the death of 15-year-old Zenizole Vena on 21 September who died at the police station.<\/li>\n<li>The health department says the investigation into Zenizole\u2019s matter is still underway. But it views the clinic closures as an unprotected strike action by staff.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>About 100 residents of Motherwell, Gqeberha, gathered outside the Thanduxolo clinic in NU10 on Wednesday. They are demanding this clinic and the clinic in NU11 be opened immediately.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/nurses-refuse-to-work-at-two-clinics-in-motherwell.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p>The NU11 clinic has been closed since the provincial Department of Health started an investigation following the death of 15-year-old Zenizole Vena on 21 September.<\/p>\n<p>It is understood that Zenizole was abducted on 17 September on her way to school in Malabar. She spent four days being drugged and raped by her captors. On 21 September she was found in the road by a resident and was taken to the NU11 clinic, but staff there apparently found she was \u201cclinically stable\u201d and sent her to the police station to open a case. She died at the police station after she had seizures. Her ordeal sparked outrage in the community. Her family intend to take legal action against the state.<\/p>\n<p>The Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa (DENOSA) said nurses at both clinics did not report for duty because they are afraid that angry community members will attack them because of Zenizole\u2019s incident. The union emphasised that this was not a strike.<\/p>\n<p>Regional Chairperson of DENOSA Vuyo Dlanga told GroundUp that as a temporary measure, nurses from the NU11 clinic had been sent to work at other clinics. \u201cThe closure of that clinic led patients to flock to the nearby Thanduxolo Clinic in NU10, which overwhelmed its services. This resulted in services not being rendered properly and our members felt threatened by patients,\u201d Dlanga said.<\/p>\n<p>Patient Noceba Sithebe has been struggling to get her monthly chronic medication. She is disabled and uses a wheelchair. She has chronic diabetes and high blood pressure. She was turned away again on Wednesday from the Thanduxolo clinic.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI stay alone and only get my grandson to push my wheelchair when he is not at school. Where and when will I get my treatment? I sent somebody to the Motherwell Healthcare Centre today and that person was also turned away,\u201d said Sithebe.<\/p>\n<p>Outside the NU10 clinic on Wednesday, ward 55 councillor Thanduxolo Doda blamed staff for not reporting for work. \u201cWe held several meetings and the nurses assured us that they would work this past Monday but they did not do so,\u201d he said. \u201cBut nurses still refuse to come to work claiming that they are afraid of angry residents,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Councillor Noxolo Mafumana said nurses had also used this opportunity to highlight unresolved long-standing grievances. \u201cNurses are angry that no resident intervened when people closed the clinic. The clinic has staff shortages and has not had any new staff since 2010. Staff say they are not safe following a string of break-ins.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mafumana said the department should hire armed security guards at the clinics during the night.<\/p>\n<p>Health department spokesperson Yonela Dekeda said the investigation into Zenizole\u2019s death is still underway. Dekeda said the staff at both Thanduxolo and NU11 have not reported for duty since Monday. \u201cThe department views this as an unprotected strike action because there had been agreements that normal operations would resume on Monday.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2022 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n<p>We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, <b>not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/nurses-refuse-to-work-at-two-clinics-in-motherwell.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Residents of Motherwell, Gqeberha gathered outside the Thanduxolo clinic on Wednesday. They are demanding two clinics which were closed be opened immediately. Photo: Joseph Chirume Two clinics in Motherwell, Gqeberha remain closed on Wednesday. This follows allegations against one of the clinics after the death of 15-year-old Zenizole Vena on 21 September who died at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":239161,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-239160","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"tag-groundup","9":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/nurses-refuse-to-work-at-two-clinics-in-motherwell.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}