Cancer patients can resume treatment as Addington Hospital's radiation machines are set to be back in use.
|||Durban - Hundreds of cancer patients, caught in the middle of a payment dispute over Addington Hospital’s state-of-the-art radiation machines, were expected to resume treatment today after an announcement that the machines would be switched on.
Technicians were expected at the hospital’s oncology unit at 7am and the radiation equipment was expected to be available to patients by 9am.
Since January, patients from Addington Hospital had been referred and ferried by bus to Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital. But, accommodating the extra patients there proved challenging and the radiation machines there were less sophisticated.
The Daily News first revealed the breakdown on December 5.
On Thursday, Health MEC Sibongiseni Dhlomo told reporters it was in the “interest of patients” that the machines were operational again.
The hospital’s oncology and radiology machines, bought in a controversial tender process for R120 million, were switched off and left unserviced in January after a dispute between the KZN Department of Health and Tecmed Africa, the company that supplied them
.
The department stopped paying Tecmed the R400 000 a month maintenance contract after it claimed the machines were fraudulently obtained.
Dave Smit, director of Tecmed, said on Friday that the machines would be “up and running”. “We sent our guys out there at 7am.
The machines will be working by 9.”
The reinstatement will be on a month-to-month basis, and it is being made despite the department threatening to blacklist the company, which also faces two criminal investigations.
Dhlomo and Dr Sibongile Zungu, the head of department, told a press briefing yesterday the department had asked an independent auditing firm to conduct a forensic investigation, which had led to the dismissals of senior department officials.
Dhlomo met representatives of Tecmed Africa’s parent company, Varian, in Switzerland earlier this week, while attending a World Health Organisation meeting, and presented a detailed report to the company regarding the investigation into irregularities surrounding the more than three-year tender and procurement process.
The MEC said in a statement the agreement was reached to ensure that service delivery for cancer patients was not compromised.
Varian said it would conduct its own investigation regarding the difficulties between Tecmed Africa and the Health Department and would then decide whether it would appoint a new local agent to carry out the maintenance.
“Of course, we cannot do trade with a blacklisted company… It will be up to the mother company to have another agent that they can deal with,” Zungu said.
Tecmed Africa’s executive chairman, Werner Begere, said they would service the machinery immediately, although the department owed the company R4m. The government, he added, owed Tecmed a total of R80m.
On the blacklisting, Begere said the department was bringing up old issues that had nothing to do with the matter at Addington Hospital.
In a short statement released last night, Begere said: “Tecmed Africa welcomes the decision from the Health Department to pay the outstanding bill for Addington Hospital and with immediate effect, we are servicing the units and recommissioning them.”
He also denied all the allegations levelled against his company by the department.
Professor Amo Jordaan, who has headed the hospital’s oncology department since 1980 and was instrumental in getting the two Varian Rapid Arc Linear Accelerators, and who quit at the end of 2012 over the department’s failure to keep the machines running, was elated.
“I am very pleased that sanity has prevailed for the patients. And it would be wonderful if these machines can do the job.”
He said he hoped that the department would strive to rebuild the morale of the staff of the Addington oncology unit, which according to him had been badly affected by the shutdown of the machines.
Jordaan said that prior to the machines’ installation, waiting times of up to eight months were usual. Once operational, the two machines had cut this to two weeks, but once they shut down patients were being transferred to Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital.
sihle.mlambo@inl.co.za
Daily News