Madam Speaker, I rise to express my shock at the level of health service at Free State hospitals. These hospitals are generally understaffed and consequently overcrowded. At the national hospital there is usually only one doctor on duty at night. It is normal for patients to wait for up to eight hours in an emergency waiting area without being attended to by a doctor.
Patients sometimes sleep on the floor for up to six days before they are provided with a bed. The medical staff at this hospital are helpless, with a high number of patients to deal with. Nurses and matrons tell stories of people dying in their chairs.
The issue of understaffing is also a normal thing at Pelonomi Hospital. The shortage of pharmacists demands that they be pulled from other regions, once a week, to help with sorting, packaging and sending medication to the different regions. When this happens, regions are left without pharmacists to attend to patients.
It is only an extraordinary person, with a social conscience, who will be able to feel and experience the pain, agony and trauma experienced by our people as they sit there for hours on end waiting for a nurse or doctor to ease their pain.
Those who only visit these areas accompanied by bodyguards with much ceremony and sirens blazing will forever live in their world of self- delusion, premised ... [Time expired.]