Pretoria - Mamelodi Hospital security guards have admitted grabbing the phone of a man who was taking pictures of his sick mother, and ejecting him, telling him never to return.
In a confidential report seen by the Pretoria News, and sent to the quality assurance section of the provincial health department as part of an investigation into last Monday’s incident, security personnel said they had only responded to a call from nursing staff, who asked them to stop a man who was taking pictures of his mother in a hospital queue.
They said he had refused to heed their warnings, forcing them to grab his phone and delete the pictures. He resisted and there was a brief argument.
They marched the man to the nearest exit and told him not to come back to the hospital again.
However, Pierre Steyn said he was disappointed because no one had called him to hear his side of the story. He said when his mother called to be fetched from the hospital on Friday, he took a risk by going into the hospital.
“She would never have made it to the car park in her wheelchair, but I was scared they would come at me and assault me again.”
Steyn left his dehydrated 66-year-old mother Gesina Pearson at the emergency section of the hospital on September 14 after a severe bout of nausea and vomiting. She was there for about 15 hours without medical attention.
He arrived after 10am last Monday to find her being put on a drip, and after helping to get her comfortable while she waited for doctors, he decided to take a picture of her before he left.
He was surprised when nurses told him he couldn’t, and when he continued to photograph his mother, security personnel pounced on him and grabbed the phone. They deleted the pictures and told him to get off hospital premises.
Pearson had been discharged from the hospital the previous Friday, after being treated for nausea and vomiting. Despite the medication given, she was unable to keep anything down and had grown weaker, prompting Steyn to take her back.
Her family felt she had been discharged without enough medical attention, after a gastroscopy was cancelled a day earlier, but a report from the hospital said when she was discharged she had no symptoms of her illness.
@ntsandvose
Pretoria News