South Africa: Limpopo department of health has noted the story circulating on social media of a patient living with disabilities waiting for a file at Siloam Hospital.
The department has since investigated the case, and the preliminary report indicates that this is a female patient living with a disability and in a wheelchair who is a known chronic patient to our facility receiving therapy, including rehabilitation by the Physiotherapy team.
According to the patient, she presented herself at the filling station in the morning at around 08h00 to collect her file, which she was told it’s missing. The patient was then advised to wait while the team tried to search for the file since the doctors and all clinicians attending to her needed her file for the sake of her clinical history and medication.
The file was ultimately found around lunchtime, the patient was seen, and her medication was prescribed and dispensed.
Our Physiotherapist committed to visiting the patient at home this coming Friday for further management and treatment.
After analyzing this unfortunate incident which is very common and many patients experience file loss whenever they visit our hospitals, the department feels it’s important to remind the public about some of the measures we put in place to address this problem:
1. The department is in the process of scanning, archiving and refilling all our medical records, starting with inactive files.
2. This process has started to free up spaces amongst our facilities, especially for active files like this one which currently, due to lack of filing spaces, our patient’s files are stored in many different places in our hospitals, resulting in their loss.
3. We have now introduced a pre-booking system where patients who are given a return date must inform the triaging nurse about their return date when they return their file to the filing station after seeing the doctor and collecting their medication. What we then do is on a daily base before knocking off. The team will then retrieve files for patients coming the following day. In that way, patients don’t wait for a long time to receive their files. Unfortunately, this system is rendered non-functional in most cases because patients don’t honour their dates, and in some cases, when files are retrieved, and patients do not show up, the file ends up getting lost. Something that our patients need to improve on to render pre-booking effective.
4. Although this doesn’t apply to the current case, patients are again encouraged to visit their local clinics for minor ailments or register on CCMDD for chronic medication. This will reduce congestion in our OPD and give staff the opportunity to focus on cases like this one.
The Department calls the public and people escorting a patient to our facilities to immediately report any dissatisfaction or experience of poor service delivery to the facility managers. The CEO is available to attend to any issues affecting our patients.
The public must first seek to assist one another in times of crisis rather than taking pictures and posting on social media, which at times takes forever to reach the management. It also, at times, affects the dignity and privacy of patients when their pictures are circulating all over social media in such compromised positions.
This we know it might have been done in good faith, but we must also remember the unwanted consequences of making such pictures public. No one will want to see their pictures trending on social media, more so when they are in a compromised situation.
