The following describes my experience of medical negligence at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. Familiar to anyone who has experienced medical negligence, it relates how the profession – doctors, nurses and administrators – react when their self-styled superiority is challenged and the lengths they go to deny mistakes and avoid accepting responsibility irrespective of the effect it has on patients. (Long read.) 1 Groote Schuur Hospital is one of the city’s major public teaching hospitals. It once had an excellent reputation, although, as with South African public hospitals in general, it has been undermined by large numbers of patients, dropping standards and its administrators’ indifference to the public. In September 2001 I presented myself at Groote Schuur’s outpatient Martin Singer Hand Clinic (orthopaedic department) with a five day-old feral cat bite wound to the right index finger metacarpal phalange (knuckle) joint, an emergency referral by my general practit...
Blog on medical and health matters with a focus on the Western Cape's public health system.