Pretoria - Public order police members were deployed at the Kalafong Provincial Tertiary Hospital in Atteridgeville yesterday to ward off intimidation and threats made by Operation Dudula against undocumented foreigners seeking medical treatment at the facility.
Hospital chief executive Dr Sello Matjila said the staff and patients were comforted by the presence of the police.
The police have been accused of failing to act against protesters preventing patients suspected of being foreigners from accessing medical services.
Minister of Health Dr Joe Phaahla is also expected to conduct a site visit to the hospital today.
For the past three weeks, protesters have been turning away undocumented foreigners from the health centre.
Despite the police’s presence, some protesters yesterday gathered outside the hospital premises, but they appeared not to pose threats to patients arriving for medical care.
Also present at the hospital were a group of EFF members who spoke out against Operation Dudula’s activities.
The EFF in Gauteng condemned protesters denying migrants access to medical care, saying the action was a blatant human rights violation.
The party called on those responsible for preventing foreigners from receiving medical attention to be held accountable.
“The Department of Health is failing in its mandate to provide quality health care to people (and) as a result they resort to cheap propaganda that labels immigrants as responsible for the collapse of the health system.
“Migrants are not to blame for the collapse of the health system. Operation Dudula and similar elements should rather direct their anger to those found guilty of looting hospital money for skinny jeans like in the case of Tembisa Hospital,” the EFF said in a media statement.
Operation Dudula representative Dan Radebe said all they were fighting for was for people to respect the laws of the country.
Meanwhile, the government has condemned the actions by those preventing people from accessing healthcare services based on the colour of their skin and the language spoken.
The government said the actions of a few were infringing on basic human rights and went against the tenets of “our hard-fought-for democracy”.
Minister in the Presidency Mondli Gungubele said: “Preventing access to healthcare can have dire consequences to patients and have a negative impact on the public health system and to citizens at large.
“We understand that the public health system is overburdened because of a myriad challenges. However, doctors and healthcare workers have an obligation to provide healthcare to those in need.”
Gungubele said South Africa subscribed to its constitutional principles in protecting the human rights of all the people living in the country.
This week protesters threatened to roll out a campaign throughout the country preventing suspected foreigners from assessing medical treatment at other hospitals.
The Department of Health on Friday obtained a court interdict from the High Court in Pretoria to stop them “from threatening, preventing and denying patients deemed to be non-South African and employees at the hospital from accessing the facility to receive medical attention and to administer care, respectively”.
Doctors Without Borders in South Africa said it was worried that protests preventing patients, including migrants, from accessing medical care amounted to xenophobia.
The organisation believed the hostility towards migrants in the health facilities “has been intensifying, fuelled by inflammatory and political statements from government officials, including Limpopo Health MEC, Dr Phophi Ramathuba, who was recently recorded berating a Zimbabwean patient in a health facility, claiming that migrants are overburdening the health system”.
Pretoria News