Donald Fraser Hospital goes a week without water
Patients reported washing with cold water given to them in small bowls for days after a pipe burst at the hospital in late August. Nurses said they could not use the toilets at work and had to wait to relieve themselves until they returned home after shifts.
Patients had no other choice but to use the facility’s toilets, which could not flush due to the lack of water.
“We are forced to use the toilets even though they do not flush,” said one patient in the male ward. “As a result, there is a strong smell that comes from the toilets which makes it difficult for us to cope in the ward.”
OurHealth visited some of the facility’s toilets to find dirty nappies on the ground and toilets full of faeces
Limpopo Department of Health spokesperson Macks Lesufi blamed the water shortage on a burst pipe. This pipe was fixed on 5 September after a visit from the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry and municipal workers.
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Donald Fraser Hospital goes a week without water
by ndivhuwomusetha, Health-e News
September 17, 2014