{"id":250042,"date":"2023-02-15T04:13:16","date_gmt":"2023-02-15T02:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/our-hospital-cant-cope-say-atlantis-residents\/"},"modified":"2023-02-15T04:13:16","modified_gmt":"2023-02-15T02:13:16","slug":"our-hospital-cant-cope-say-atlantis-residents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/our-hospital-cant-cope-say-atlantis-residents\/","title":{"rendered":"Our hospital can\u2019t cope, say Atlantis residents"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/Peter%20Luhanga\/allisonadams1.jpeg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"warn_big\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/our-hospital-cant-cope-say-atlantis-residents.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Atlantis community activist Allison Adams has launched an online petition calling on the City of Cape Town to transfer two clinics to the Western Cape Department of Health. Photo: Peter Luhanga<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Atlantis has two City-run clinics that offer general health services such as HIV, child and basic antenatal care.<\/li>\n<li>For most health issues people have to go to Wesfleur Hospital and it is struggling to cope with the demand.<\/li>\n<li>Community activists want the two clinics upgraded and run by the province to take the pressure off the hospital.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>People living in Atlantis, Cape Town, say they are struggling to access healthcare. There are two clinics run by the City \u2013 Saxon Sea and Protea Park \u2013 offering limited care, concentrating on family planning, child health, basic antenatal care, and HIV care. For any other health issues, residents have to go to Wesfleur Hospital. People queue for treatment as early as 5am.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/our-hospital-cant-cope-say-atlantis-residents.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p>In 2017, we wrote about the long queues and other problems at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/atlantis-residents-demand-better-service-wesfleur-hospital\/\">Wesfleur Hospital<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Community activists have set up the Atlantis Community Health Organisation (ACHO), which submitted a memorandum of grievances in August last year to Western Cape MEC for Health Nomafrench Mbombo, and resident Allison Adams, (not part of the ACHO) set up an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.change.org\/p\/primary-healthcare-for-atlantis-in-the-western-cape?source_location=search\">online petition<\/a> that has garnered over 1,275 signatures.<\/p>\n<p>Adams and ACHO want the two City clinics taken over by the province so that they can be upgraded to offer primary and not just general healthcare. This would take pressure off Wesfleur.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cClinics would serve as a conduit to relieve the hospital from everyday attendance. The hospital can\u2019t cope. We have limited number of doctors available every day,\u201d says Ashley Poole of ACHO.<\/p>\n<p>Adams says the doctors can\u2019t cope with treating patients, doing ward rounds and conducting medical assessments for residents seeking disability grants. It takes days for people to get help at the hospital, she says, and everyone with even a minor illness has to go to the hospital.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe have people traveling to Dunoon Community Health Center to seek medical attention,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<p>ACHO wants a new hospital built in Atlantis, which in the 2011 Census already had nearly 70,000 people.<\/p>\n<p>Mayoral committee member for health Patricia van der Ross said the City is open to transferring the clinics, but \u201cthe Western Cape health department must have the requisite budget available to continue running the clinics\u201d. Then a handover agreement can be concluded.<\/p>\n<p>She said a task team was established and \u201cnumerous meetings\u201d were held explaining to the community the challenges involved in doing such a transfer.<\/p>\n<p>One interim measure is that stable, chronic patients are seen at Protea Park three days a week on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays between 8am and 4pm, and at Saxonsea clinic on Mondays between 8am and 1pm.<\/p>\n<p>Provincial health department spokesperson Natalie Watlington said since receiving the memorandum in August 2022, the department\u2019s district team has implemented short and medium-term interventions to improve matters at Wesfleur Hospital.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2023 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\/2023\/02\/our-hospital-cant-cope-say-atlantis-residents.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Atlantis community activist Allison Adams has launched an online petition calling on the City of Cape Town to transfer two clinics to the Western Cape Department of Health. Photo: Peter Luhanga Atlantis has two City-run clinics that offer general health services such as HIV, child and basic antenatal care. For most health issues people have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":250043,"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":[9928,3247],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-250042","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"category-news","9":"tag-groundup","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/our-hospital-cant-cope-say-atlantis-residents.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250042","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=250042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250042\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}