A WEEK after the last working lift at Port Elizabeth's Provincial Hospital broke, one of the hospital's three lifts was repaired on Tuesday night.
This followed a dispute over the non-payment of the contractors by the Eastern Cape Health Department, after urgent meetings to clear up confusion caused by invoices from the lift company that went missing.
The other two lifts still remain out of service.
Last week, the head of the Port Elizabeth Hospital Complex's clinical services, Dr Aydin Vehbi, asked Health MEC Sicelo Gqobana to intervene and said the company that serviced the lifts had not been paid. Patients were forced to walk to their own surgeries but as there was no way to return, wards that could be accessed from the ground floor became overcrowded.
In some cases, patients, medical personnel and visitors to the hospital had to climb up to eight flights of stairs. – Estelle Ellis
