On Thursday, 11 April 2019, the MMC for Health and Social Development, Councillor Mpho Phalatse and I had the pleasure of officially opening Esselen Clinic in Hillbrow.
The clinic already provides comprehensive preventative and curative health services including HIV, and TB related treatment, care and support services. It will cover Hillbrow, the inner-city, Parktown, Joubert Park, Braamfontein, and Doornfontein.
This pleases me greatly because it forms part of an envisaged larger health precinct in and around Hillbrow, what with the Hillbrow Community Health Centre, South Rand Hospital, and Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital within reach for residents. We look forward to developing it further.
This particular clinic currently has just six nurses and is short staffed, and that is down to challenges with budgets. This is an issue facing many of our health facilities. I was made aware of similar worries facing Rabie Ridge Clinic, which I visited a week ago.
With 22 clinics now forming part of our extended hours programme, many nurses and clinic staff are availing themselves to work longer in order to ensure that patients, both with acute or chronic ailments, receive the medical attention they need when they need it.
The public health system is largely characterised by facilities buckling under the pressure of ever-increasing number of patients, long waiting times and a generally poor quality of care. The system is stretched. Added to this, the private health sector is not only able to attract most of the country’ highly skilled health professionals, it also caters to the upwardly mobile – leaving the majority behind. Without any healthcare to speak of, the latter add onto the already high numbers of South Africa’s sick.
This state of affairs has dire consequences for any nation’s future. A sick nation is simply an unproductive and hopeless nation. In seeking to demonstrate how intertwined health is to the development of a nation, the World Health Organisation notes that better health makes an important contribution to economic progress.
However, none of us would be in public service if we didn’t believe we could affect tangible change. The opening of facilities like Esselen Clinic should serve as encouragement for the work the City’s health and social development department is putting into the healthcare in Johannesburg.
Although small in size, we should not underestimate the crucial role it will play in the loves of the thousands of the residents in and around Hillbrow. This goes for all the clinics that have either been refurbished or built by this multiparty government.
With that in mind, I’d like to extend my gratitude to MMC Phalatse as well as each official within the health and social development department for their continued commitment.
Furthermore, I wish to thank every healthcare worker in our facilities for assisting us in improving the delivery of quality healthcare across the city.
Finally, thanks to the members of our coalition government; yej IFP. ACDP, COPE, UDM and FF Plus for their support – and of course the EFF, which although not a member of our coalition, votes with us on an issue-by-issue basis.