Health e News
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Hospice care does not just end with tending to the health needs of the sick. While following a home-based care-giver from the Mofolo Hospice in Soweto, it’€™s evident that care-givers often deal with social problems of their patients.
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This week is Hospice Week in South Africa. To mark this, we look at the work of a few hospices. When it first set up in Mofolo, Soweto, in a corrugated iron structure nine years ago, Mofolo Hospice had only two nursing sisters and less than 40 patients. Today, the centre has a staffing complement of 20 and over 500 patients in its books.
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The much talked about Johannesburg-based Zuzimpilo Medical Centre is experiencing difficulties in meeting its target of enrolling 1000 people on ARV treatment before the end of the year.
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Late last November, the first subsidised, low-cost HIV and AIDS care clinic, opened in Johannesburg. Five months later, clinic management is concerned that demand for the service hasn’€™t quite reached expectations.
Leading environmental scientists say unfavorable weather conditions caused by global climate change could fuel the spread of malaria in areas where it has never been experienced before.
A publication looking at health and human rights would be incomplete without a focus on HIV/AIDS. The recently-published Health & Democracy is one such book.
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The Democratic Nurses’€™ Union of South Africa (DENOSA) is calling upon the Health Department, to strengthen safety measures to protect nurses from the highly infectious Multi-Drug and Extremely-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis
The World Health Organisation has called on governments to include a childhood vaccine, known as Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine, which acts against pneumonia and meningitis in their national immunisation programmes. Pneumonia is the leading cause of death in children globally, and more so, in countries with a high burden of HIV.
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Dr. Hugo Templeman, a Dutch physician who runs one of the best clinics in the impoverished rural village of Elandsdoorn in Limpopo province says that his is a model rural clinic.
Refugees, asylum seekers, economic and undocumented or illegal migrants all flock to South Africa for particular reasons. Often, locals believe that these are to steal away what belongs to South Africans, such as health care. Two refugees who benefit from the South African health care system explain that when they fled their countries of origin, it wasn’€™t to seek antiretroviral therapy.
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The senior regional HIV/AIDS coordinator for the United Nations’€™ High Commission for Refugees, says the inclusion of refugees in South Africa’€™s antiretroviral therapy programme will not result in the influx of refugees into the country.
As with every citizen, refugees have rights, including the right to health care. In line with that the Southern African HIV Clinicians’€™ Society and the United Nations’€™ High Commission for Refugees recently launched a policy to guide health workers in the region on providing antiretrovirals to refugees.