Cape Town - What a difference a year makes. Last year at this time the Western Cape reported a historic reduction of incidents in hospital trauma and emergency centres at public hospitals across the province.
At the time, with alert level 3 and a night time curfew in place, provincial head of health Dr Keith Cloete said the busiest hospital was Tygerberg, with 12 trauma cases reported, Groote Schuur had six cases, Khayelitsha and Somerset had four each, and Karl Bremer in Parow had none at all (Lockdown credited for drop in New Year’s trauma cases in Cape Town).
This year at adjusted level 1 and the lifting of the curfew the province saw 1 652 trauma-related admissions between 8pm on December 31 and 8am Monday, January 2.
Provincial Health spokesperson Mark van der Heever said these included 31 gunshot wounds, 580 stabbings and 418 blunt assaults.
“They also include 47 motor vehicle accident cases, 60 pedestrian accident cases, 10 gender-based violence (GBV) cases and the balance of other trauma-related incidents.”
At the same time, paramedics with the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) responded to 5 348 incidents across the province, down from 1 243 incidents at the Christmas weekend.
EMS spokesperson Byron La Hoe said: “Overall, 44% of this weekend’s incidents occurred in the Cape Metro region.
“Ambulance crews were escorted by the police to attend to 50 incidents in Beacon Valley, 39 in Tafelsig, 26 in Hanover Park and 10 in Chicago, Paarl.”
He said the top five incident types for the weekend included non-cardiac pain (883), weapon assault (771), respiratory complaints (453), physical assault (31), and obstetric or gynaecological complaints (310).
Meanwhile, police spokesperson Christopher Spies said that their safer festive season operations in the Southern Cape yielded the arrest of 185 suspects for various offences during operations which began on Thursday, December 30 and ended on Sunday morning at 6am.
“The combined efforts of various police units and counterparts from traffic as well as law enforcement further also resulted in the arrest 21 suspects for drug-related offences and 14 for driving a motor vehicle while under the influence of liquor.”