{"id":239422,"date":"2022-10-07T16:48:08","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T14:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/maternity-wards-at-dora-nginza-hospital-chaotic-as-nurses-down-tools\/"},"modified":"2022-10-07T16:48:08","modified_gmt":"2022-10-07T14:48:08","slug":"maternity-wards-at-dora-nginza-hospital-chaotic-as-nurses-down-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/maternity-wards-at-dora-nginza-hospital-chaotic-as-nurses-down-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Maternity wards at Dora Nginza Hospital \u201cchaotic\u201d as nurses down tools"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/Joseph%20Chirume\/nurses_strike.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/maternity-wards-at-dora-nginza-hospital-chaotic-as-nurses-down-tools.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Services at the Dora Nginza Hospital in Gqeberha, Eastern Cape have been under strain as the nurse\u2019s strike entered its second day on Friday. Photo: Joseph Chirume<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Nurses at the Dora Nginza Hospital in Gqeberha, Eastern Cape downed tools for a second day on Friday.<\/li>\n<li>The striking nurses are demanding that management provide more beds and staff to the maternity wards, among other demands. They claim that their previous engagements with the health department have been fruitless.<\/li>\n<li>DENOSA says that maternity wards don\u2019t have enough beds, so some patients who had just given birth were removed from beds to accommodate those in labour. Other patients slept on the floor or benches.<\/li>\n<li>Health department says it considers the nurses\u2019 action as an unprotected strike. \u201cThe department takes this very seriously, and the administrative and legal remedies at our disposal are being deployed.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Services at the Dora Nginza Hospital in Gqeberha, Eastern Cape are under strain as the nurse\u2019s strike entered its second day on Friday. The striking nurses are demanding that management provide more beds and staff to the maternity wards, among other demands. They claim that their previous engagements with the health department have been fruitless.<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\/maternity-wards-at-dora-nginza-hospital-chaotic-as-nurses-down-tools.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p>On Thursday, some patients were moved to another hospital. Dora Nginza Hospital is the centre for maternal and paediatric care for the western part of the Eastern Cape.<\/p>\n<p>A pregnant woman at the hospital described the maternity ward as \u201cchaotic\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHeavily pregnant women were crying for help that was not coming. Many people are sleeping on the cold floor and there is a smell of blood in the ward. The few nurses there are overwhelmed,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>Vuyo Nodlawu, regional chairperson of the Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa (DENOSA), told GroundUp that the maternity wards do not have enough beds and resources to cope with the influx of patients since Monday. \u201cPatients, be it prenatal or postnatal, did not have beds to sleep on. The situation has been getting worse, to the extent that patients who had given birth were removed from beds to accommodate those in labour,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Nodlawu said the hospital\u2019s management had told medical practitioners to stop admitting patients if there were no more beds available or until the matter was resolved. \u201cHowever, the doctors continued to admit patients. Nurses then decided to allocate all available beds within the maternal department to everyone who didn\u2019t have a bed,\u201d said Nodlawu.<\/p>\n<p>A meeting was called between the maternal directorate from the head office and the hospital but it was unsuccessful.<\/p>\n<p>Mzikazi Nkatha, provincial deputy secretary of the National Union of Public Service and Allied Workers (NUPSAW)\u2019s, said, \u201cNurses are saying enough is enough. They can\u2019t continue as normal when patients have to lie on the floor and not on hospital beds. This is also an overwhelming number of patients and not enough health providers to care for them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Health department spokesperson Yonela Dekeda said union leaders have not been willing to negotiate with officials sent by management. Dekeda said plans to \u201cdecongest\u201d Dora Nginza Hospital are underway, with emergency cases being referred to Port Elizabeth Provincial Hospital.<\/p>\n<p>She said a team from other hospitals across the district were deployed to assist. The team included Anaesthetics, Obstetrics , Gynaecology, Paediatrics, Neonatology, Nursing and non-clinical support services.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe designated ward and theatre at the Provincial Hospital has been staffed and equipped with the relevant equipment and medication. The Emergency Medical Services is also part of the response team and will coordinate patient transfers between facilities,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>Dekeda said the department considers the nurses\u2019 action as an unprotected strike. \u201cThese essential workers are refusing to engage with senior management nor do they want to return to work. The department takes this very seriously and the administrative and legal remedies at our disposal are being deployed,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>DENOSA\u2019s deputy regional chairperson Vuyo Dlanga has vowed that nurses would continue their action until provincial government officials meet them to resolve the issues.<\/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\/maternity-wards-at-dora-nginza-hospital-chaotic-as-nurses-down-tools.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Services at the Dora Nginza Hospital in Gqeberha, Eastern Cape have been under strain as the nurse\u2019s strike entered its second day on Friday. Photo: Joseph Chirume Nurses at the Dora Nginza Hospital in Gqeberha, Eastern Cape downed tools for a second day on Friday. The striking nurses are demanding that management provide more beds [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":239423,"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-239422","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\/maternity-wards-at-dora-nginza-hospital-chaotic-as-nurses-down-tools.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239422","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=239422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}