The Eastern Cape Department of Health has circulated a concept paper that would fold the Sarah Baartman Emergency Medical Services call centre into the provincial facility in Gqeberha, uprooting twenty experienced communications officers from Dr Beyers Naudé district and transplanting them to the city.
I have written to the MEC for Health, Tandokazi Capa, urging her to withdraw this reckless plan without delay. I have also requested an in-person meeting on Monday morning to set out the dangers it poses.
Download the letter.
Officials claim the move will shorten response times, harness digital technology, and drive uniform standards as part of their fourth industrial revolution agenda. These aims sound sensible until one looks at the record of centralised control in the province. The eKomani provincial call centre, proudly launched with modern hardware and software, has slid into failure because the call-takers are poorly trained, badly supervised, and often unable to dispatch help where it is needed.
Download the concept document.
Digital tools are useless when the basic infrastructure is absent. Many rural clinics and hospitals in Sarah Baartman still have no reliable broadband connection, despite repeated promises of province-wide coverage since the start of the sixth administration. Integrating their calls into a city-based hub will not produce faster ambulances when the network connection drops or doesn’t exist in the first place.
The Legislature’s Health Portfolio Committee has long urged a return to district and sub-district control so that communities receive care close to home. The Department itself promotes a hub-and-spoke model for district services, and the national government champions the District Development Model. The current proposal contradicts every one of these strategies.
The Department has already paid a heavy price for ill-considered staff transfers. The closure of Orsmond TB Hospital left scores of employees stranded on the payroll and cost more than R130 million in salaries for people with no work to perform. Repeating that mistake with twenty EMS staff will disrupt twenty families, drain scarce funds, and leave the district poorer in skills and capacity.
Digital technology should connect services wherever patients live. What cripples Emergency Medical Services in our province is not geography but chronic mismanagement, inadequate training, and party-political appointments that place loyalty above competence. The Department would serve the people far better by fixing these failings than by chasing yet another costly reorganisation.
The residents of Sarah Baartman deserve a responsive ambulance service rooted in their own district. They have waited long enough for the Department of Health to put their safety first.