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Doctors Without Borders said after sending a team of healthcare workers to the Eastern Cape to assist hospitals facing a Covid19 crisis, they were now urging the National Health Department to improve its national emergency response capacity.
According to MSF, the public health system in the Nelson Mandela Bay “reached the brink of collapse in November due to a catastrophic shortage of human resources unable to handle a surge in COVID-19 cases.”
In a statement on Wednesday, the organisation said the Health Department must ensure that medical staff can be rapidly assigned to developing COVID-19 hotspots countrywide, to fill critical staffing gaps.
MSF medical coordinator in Nelson Mandela Bay, Dr Colin Pfaff, said they have been in the Metro since mid-November, supporting staffing gaps at Livingstone Hospital and at the field hospital.
"COVID-19 is a fast-moving pandemic that is very human resource-intensive, whereas South Africa's health system is bureaucratic and often hampered by staffing shortages,” he said.
“To save lives and provide essential care a more agile way of responding to COVID-19 outbreaks is urgently needed,” Dr Pfaff said after Doctors Without Borders provided support in Khayelitsha in Cape Town, Butterworth in the Eastern Cape and now Nelson Mandela Bay.
He said South Africa has the available resources to respond to COVID-19 hotspots but currently lacks the planning and coordination to activate those resources in time.
“This can change but it needs to be done swiftly,” he said.
Dr Pfaff, “during the last week, there has been a reduction in the number of new COVID-19 cases registered in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro and the situation in facilities has stabilised slightly, although promised human resources have been slow to materialise and the system remains deeply stressed.”
He said additional hotspots have emerged in parts of the Eastern and Western Cape provinces and MSF believes the likelihood of many more hotspots developing is high.
"With facilities across the country experiencing shortages of critical staff after a bruising first COVID-19 wave, a repeat of the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro crisis in other parts of the country is a real risk," Pfaff said.
According to Dr John Black, head of the infectious diseases division at Livingstone Hospital, additional doctors and nurses from MSF arrived at a time when there were more patients with severe COVID-19 disease coming in than at the peak of the first wave, but fewer doctors and nurses as a result of burn-out and other issues.
"The additional human resources enabled us to elevate our own response with the opening of a new COVID-19 ward for high acuity patients in the basement of the hospital, which had been standing empty due to a lack of doctors and nurses to staff it," Dr Black said.
"This has helped us to decongest and stabilise our point of care ward. Similarly, the support of MSF staff has helped to decongest the large field hospital, freeing up more beds and enabling other hospitals to refer some of the patients they are unable to manage," he said.
