Acclaimed talk show host Tom Holmes, also known as Tom London, has made headlines for a video in which he drew attention to the deplorable state of Helen Joseph Hospital. He said he discharged himself when flies from a corpse turned his hospital stay into a nightmare.
Speaking via videolink from the Morningside Mediclinic, a private facility, on Monday, Holmes told Salaamedia that conditions at the state-run Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg forced him to seek treatment at a private facility. He was able to do so thanks to the contributions of generous donors.
“The final straw for me was when a man died in the bed diagonally opposite me … but they left his body there for three or four hours,” he explained.
Quickly, about 100 flies, he estimated, swarmed to the corpse before being joined by another 100. Then, they invaded his space.
“About another 200 flies came through the window and went to his dead body, and then they started coming to me! So now, I’ve got flies on me that have just come from the dead guy that’s died of a really infectious disease, walking along my water cups.”
“It was at that point I thought, ‘I don’t want to be treated like a subhuman by the doctors and I don’t want flies crawling all over my skin, coming from the dead guy opposite me,” he reasoned.
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No care, compassion or dignity
Holme’s five-minute video set social media abuzz over the weekend. In it, he drew attention to the appalling conditions patients are exposed to at public health facilities. Broken taps were just the surface of the problem.
“I experienced a little bit of it, but I watched many other patients around me and many doctors exposing themselves to these people without any kind of care, without any kind of compassion, without any kind of dignity, or respect,” he told Salaamedia.
Such were the conditions of patients admitted into public healthcare facilities:
“It’s very difficult when you’re lying on a mattress that you can feel the springs, you can’t sleep, the food is no good, you can’t have a bath, the toilets are bad, and then on top of that you put the uncaring nature of the doctors.”
Meanwhile, Gauteng health MEC Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko met with the facility’s management team and senior officials in the department. In a statement on Sunday, the provincial department said it was “satisfied” that “adequate clinical care was discharged”.
Picture via IOL.
