Village Clinic: Activists threaten court action if no changedemand action or
TAC PRESS RELEASE: NO PROGRESS WITH TENT CLINIC
Lusikisiki Village Clinic serves up to 7000 people a month in Qaukeni sub district in the Eastern Cape. The clinic had been operating out of a building in the centre of Lusikisiki since 2005. In January 2013, the Eastern Cape Department of Health moved the clinic out of the building and reopened it in an empty plot on the outskirts of town with a park home and two tents now intended to house the clinic.
Lactating mothers, young children, the elderly and the very ill now stand in long queues in the sun or rain to see a nurse or collect medication. There is no privacy in which to consult with nurses, no electricity, and only a single filthy privy toilet. Tens of thousands of Rand of medicines are stored in the heat without any security and without any cold storage facilities for medicines requiring refrigeration. Community members are forced to take two taxis to get to the clinic or to take a taxi into town and then walk the couple of kilometres to the clinic.
The Treatment Action Campaign (“TAC”) has been engaging with the Eastern Cape Department of Health on the issue of Lusikisiki Village Clinic since late 2012. In February 2013 TAC asked SECTION27 for its assistance. Since then SECTION27, representing TAC, has written four letters to the MEC for Health. The MEC’s responses make it clear that no proper plan exists for the delivery of decent health care services to the people who depend on Lusikisiki Village Clinic. SECTION27 has now sent a letter of demand to the MEC on TAC’s behalf demanding an explanation and plan of action. Should no satisfactory response be forthcoming, TAC will have little option but to approach the courts for relief.
The letter of demand is available here section27.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Letter-to-MEC-11-April-2013-Lusikisiki-VIllage-Clinic-copy.pdf
SECTION27’s previous report on Village Clinic is available herehttp://www.section27.org.za/2013/02/11/tacandsection27demandimmediaterelocationofvillagecliniclusikisiki/report-on-lusikisiki-village-clinic-final-8-feb-2013-2/
Author
-
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
View all posts
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.
Village Clinic: Activists threaten court action if no changedemand action or
by Health-e News, Health-e News
April 12, 2013