Voting this year will mark 25 years since the end of apartheid rule, but hopes have been dashed that the new era would produce a modern, accessible public health service.
JOHANNESBURG - Six psychiatric patients are tied to their beds in two tiny, dimly lit cubicles in the emergency ward of South Africa's biggest hospital, where the country's dire healthcare crisis is starkly evident.
Staff say the hospital always has serious mental health cases in its casualty unit waiting for a bed. When it came to power in 1994 at the end of white-minority rule, the African National Congress party vowed to introduce "affordable health care, to ensure that all South Africans are guaranteed basic treatment."
In 2017, that imbalance was reflected by only 10% of the black majority having health insurance, compared to 71.7% of the white minority. Speaking outside Baragwanath, DA provincial shadow health minister Jack Bloom said the flagship hospital was at breaking point. The vast and crumbling Baragwanath hospital has approximately 3,200 beds for some 1.5 million surrounding residents while also serving as a teaching hospital and a referral hospital from across South Africa and even across Africa.
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