Opposition parties have questioned the seriousness behind the announcement that the provincial department of health will soon embark on replacing the existing Tygerberg Hospital with two hospitals in an “unbundling” exercise.
During a public hearing on the department’s budget vote before the legislature’s standing committee on health, department head Dr Keith Cloete said: “On the issue of Tygerberg’s unbundling, the bigger rationale has always been that Tygerberg Hospital will be replaced using a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) procurement approach.”
Cloete said: “We have talked about either rebuilding Tygerberg Hospital exactly where it is, or because it is such a big hospital, taking up the opportunity to separate the highly specialized services from the more generalized specialist services, what we call the regional component.
“In terms of international norms, it is probably technically better to separate it into two entities. It is more efficient to run two hospitals than it is to run one hospital because the one hospital is so big.”
Cloete said the national government was willing to put money towards the construction of the Tygerberg regional hospital which, in the department’s plans, would be situated in Belhar, “which makes the regional hospital more accessible and closer to where the people are as it will be right on the R300”.
Health MEC Nomafrench Mbombo said: “The current Tygerberg Hospital (is) functioning as a tertiary and academic hospital as well as a regional hospital; we thought that splitting it in two will reduce the load.”
ANC committee member Rachel Windvogel said: “The real issues in Tygerberg Hospital are beyond the fact that it’s operating as a tertiary and regional hospital. The issue is that the DA has failed to manage the hospital, including infrastructure and personnel. Now the talks of unbundling are a diplomatic way of saying they want to close it.”
Good party MPL Brett Herron said: “The province’s record of delivery in keeping its promises about refurbishing hospitals is not great. The province shut down GF Jooste Hospital in 2013.
“That hospital, located between Manenberg and Gugulethu, served about 1.6 million people. The province promised to refurbish that hospital and reopen in it in 2016 but that never happened.”
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Source: Cape Argus
