As infection rise, North West hospital ends visits
With increasing Covid-19 infections in the province, a North West hospital has suspended patient visits as fears of cross-infections grow.
Until now, the Tshepong Hospital in Klerksdorp has allowed one visitor under strict restrictions. The facility has 150 beds dedicated to treating Covid-19.
“It’s a difficult time for patients and healthcare workers as many of them are getting infected. We have also lost healthcare workers due to the virus and this affects our staff strength when nurses and doctors take leave to go into isolation,” says Professor Binu Luke, who heads academic and clinical services at the hospital.
Professor Luke says there are also high levels of anxiety among staff and patients, and reducing visits will help this. The hospital’s treatment team will determine and approve any exceptions.
Communication via cellphone
Professor Luke tells Health-e-News that hospital management has put measures in place to ensure that patients are able to communicate with their families.
“We understand that it is difficult for patients to stay in hospital without seeing their loved ones. Arrangements have been made where patients can have access to telephones and they are also allowed to use their cellphones,” says Professor Luke.
More beds for increasing infections
The North West has had over 22,000 infections, with approximately 9,600 still active cases and 150 deaths.
To increase the number of Covid-19 treatment beds in the Dr Kenneth Kaunda District, officials have made two hospitals available, Westvaal in Orkney and Duff Scott Hospital. These hospitals will admit patients who are showing symptoms and those who are asymptomatic.
Meanwhile, North West Health MEC Madoda Sambatha paid tribute to the frontline workers who have succumbed to Covid-19.
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.
As infection rise, North West hospital ends visits
by Nthusang Lefafa, Health-e News
August 12, 2020