Court restores order in Khayelitsha health services
Judge Siraj Desai found that the Western Cape Provincial government as well as the Ministers of Health and Public Works and Administration acted unconstitutionally by violating the rights of patients.
The court upheld the evidence from the Treatment Action Campaign, doctors and nurses who work in Khayelitsha that service provision had been affected because of the dismissals.
Desai found that the dismissals in Khayelitsha disrupted the delivery of health services and that this constituted a violation of the constitutional right to access to health care services.
The court also ordered the respondents to return to court on the 20th of August 2007 to show why they should not be ordered to restore the reasonable functioning of health services in Khayelitsha.
Aids Law Project attorney Fatima Hassan described the court ruling as an important victory for the people of Khayelitsha.
‘This is because the Court has found that the Respondents acted unconstitutionally and unlawfully by acting without a contingency plan ‘ in other words, they dismissed workers without a contingency plan leading to a disruption of health services in Khayelitsha,’ explained Hassan.
The TAC said in a statement that the only reasonable way for government to restore services and implement the court order was to reinstate the dismissed workers. ‘TAC appeals to government to do this immediately,’ the activists said.
The TAC will accompany the dismissed workers to the health facility in the morning and will also offer to volunteer in the facility.
The Western Cape Health Department confirmed earlier this month that 31 health workers had been dismissed at Site B, one at Nolungile and 10 at Michael Mapongwana. This was out of a total of 80 dismissals in the province.
Health department spokesperson Faiza Steyn said at the time the department was convinced that all those who had been fired had specifically compromised the delivery of health services and acted unlawfully.
Steyn also said at the time the decision (to fire the workers) was regarded as final.
Yesterday, Western Cape Department of Health spokesperson Miranda Anthony said they had noted the judgement.
‘The Department is currently evaluating the implications of the judgement and will only comment further once this evaluation has been completed,’ she said.
National health department spokesperson Sibani Mngagi said they were studying the ruling and ‘will respond accordingly to the legal implications of this ruling’.
He said interim efforts were being made to ensure that ‘health services that were disrupted by an illegal industrial action are provided to the community of Khayelitsha in line with the ruling of the court’.
‘Government has put at the negotiation table a settlement offer which includes a clear proposal on the return to work process relating to dismissed health workers.
‘Unfortunately, this process which is crucial to the normalization of essential health service delivery in the country is being delayed by labour organizations that have been unable to sign the agreement,’ said Mngadi.
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.
Court restores order in Khayelitsha health services
by Anso Thom, Health-e News
June 26, 2007
Related
Gauteng: ‘A dream gone wrong’
Professor Ashraf Coovadia shakes his head. ‘What really grates me is that we have the resources. Yes, we have challenges, but we have the skills, we have the facilities, we have the expertise ‘ much more than in most of Africa and in certain respects comparable to the developed world’.