Cape Town - The provincial Health and Wellness Department won’t be seeing an end to its elective surgery backlog, however it is allocating additional funding and measures to at least make a dent in it.
The department outlined its surgical backlog strategy at the Tygerberg Hospital on Tuesday.
Dr Saadiq Karriem, chief director general, specialist and emergency services in the Western Cape Department of Health, said on average, the province performs around 165 000 overall surgeries.
“By December 2021, with that backlog, we had done 22% fewer operations provincially. That’s about 37 000 in terms of the backlog.
“By December 2021, that backlog was 22% less; in other words, we’ve done 22% fewer operations by December 2021, directly because of Covid-19, so that’s about just over 23 000.”
The department has allocated R20 million provisionally for the surgical backlog recovery, of which R13m has been allocated for the metropole and R7m for rural areas.
Some R30m additional funding has been allocated for resources to tackle mental health issues.
“We’ve got a further additional allocation for obstetrics and neonatal, another pressure point that has been around for a very long time. We had this pressure point even pre-Covid-19, so we’ve allocated some funding for obstetric services as well, about R15m.”
Tygerberg Hospital surgery head Professor Elmin Steyn said the elective surgery backlog at the hospital stands at 10 000.
“Those are the ones on our lists and include all the surgical disciplines. And these are people waiting and they can wait a little bit, but the problem is, a lot of those become urgent, and then they land up on another kind of waiting list – the waiting list for urgent surgeries.
“We never actually catch up completely because as we speak, every day that goes by there are more patients.
“We’re seeing people coming from other provinces because of the failure of health care in those provinces,” Steyn said.
Hospital medical services manager Dr André Muller said the hospital runs 30 000 operations annually.
“We’re doing one additional (waiting) list per day, so there are five lists per week additional, that’s about 20 lists per month, and that will help to clear the backlogs. Every additional list will have an impact.”
Extra anaesthetic and nursing and surgeons will be required, and more consumables purchased.
Mbombo thanked the various fund-raising efforts run by Smile Foundation, Gift of the Givers and the Tygerberg Hospital Children’s Trust.