Pretoria - With seven in 10 South Africans dependent on public clinics, hospitals and other public institutions when ill or injured, the need to urgently address the country’s infrastructure backlog needs to be reinstated.
This is according to chief executive of Gap Infrastructure Corporation, Roelof van den Berg, who said it was revealed that as many as 265 state hospitals and 1 903 primary health-care facilities require urgent upgrades and maintenance to bring them up to acceptable standards.
Van den Berg said while research shows an impressive 98% of the population live within at least two hours of a government hospital, households living in rural areas were often affected by unequal access to health care and forced to travel long distances to urban areas for advanced medical treatment.
However, although people live within two hours of a government hospital, little over half or 58% of the country’s district hospitals offer surgical capacity in the form of a surgical provider and a functional operating theatre.
Van den Berg said given the vital importance of public health care, South Africa needed to urgently prioritise investments in health infrastructure to address the backlog and plug the resources gap in this space.
As a result, it was encouraging to see provincial health departments responsible for overseeing district hospitals had significantly increased their expenditure over the past few years.
Six of the 10 provincial government departments that recorded the largest capital expenditure increases between 2020 and 2021 were all health departments, he said.
“Likewise, Gap Infrastructure Corporation is honoured to be playing an instrumental role in bridging the gap through lending our infrastructure development expertise to world-class projects such as the state-of-the-art New Mapulaneng Hospital in Bushbuckridge in Mpumalanga,” Van den Berg said.
“Home to more than half a million people, Bushbuckridge community faces a number of challenges, including an official unemployment rate of some 52.1% and a youth unemployment rate of 64.6%. In terms of infrastructure, the numbers are even more shocking, with only 6.8% of households boasting a flush toilet with connected sewerage, and 11.9% of households with access to piped water within their dwellings.
“With so many surrounding households living in poverty, community involvement in the hospital project has also been a strategic priority from the outset.”
Pretoria News