Durban - KwaZulu-Natal’s first dedicated government-owned eye hospital was officially opened on Tuesday by the province’s premier Senzo Mchunu.
Mchunu said that although the province had seen its total budget cut by R3.6 billion over the past three years, the provincial government still had to provide health services, of which McCord’s Hospital in Durban would a part of.
He said that the province faced several burdens in providing health care, ranging from the provision of health services that had been neglected during the apartheid years, to declining budgets, the high HIV/Aids burden in the province and the high medical costs the province had to endure as a result of the carnage on the province’s roads during the festive seasons.
“Against all those odds we are also trying to deliver health services that were never there (in the rural areas).”
The 100-year-old McCord’s Hospital, which was a privately run non-profit hospital that received a government subsidy, was facing closure in 2012 when US funding for its HIV/Aids project dried up.
The provincial health department took ownership of the hospital last February and during the past year it has been refitted to become the province’s only dedicated eye hospital which can handle 500 outpatients daily and perform up to 40 cataract operations daily.
Mchunu said it had never been an option to allow McCord’s to close because apart from the fact that services would have been reduced in the area, more than 200 staff would have faced the loss of their jobs.
“The opening of this eye hospital is good news,” he said.
An amount of R135 million had been budgeted, of which R71.4 million had already been spent on commissioning the hospital.
ANA