Mapaballo Borotho
- The Health Ombudsman has found that psychiatric patients at the Northern Cape Mental Health Hospital died due to prolonged electricity failures caused by theft and vandalism.
- Patients were exposed to freezing conditions, with some dying from hypothermia, pneumonia, and stroke, while nurses worked in the dark with cellphone torches.
- Professor Taole Mokoena slammed the hospital for taking a year to restore power, saying the deaths could have been prevented.
The Health Ombudsman, Professor Taole Mokoena, has revealed that several psychiatric patients in the Northern Cape died after the province’s main mental health hospital failed to restore electricity for over a year.
Mokoena released the findings of his investigation on Wednesday in Pretoria, following a complaint lodged by Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi after multiple patient deaths in 2024.
According to the report, the power crisis at Northern Cape Mental Health Hospital, caused by theft and vandalism of electrical infrastructure, forced the facility to rely on a diesel-powered generator.
The outages exposed patients to bitterly cold conditions and left nurses working in the dark with cellphone torches.
The probe confirmed that one patient, Mohoto, died in July 2024 from multilobar pneumonia.
Another patient, Tshepo Mdimbaza, died in August 2024 from hypothermia. A third patient, Louw, suffered a stroke linked to severe hypothermia, while a fourth, De Bruin, also endured hypothermia.
Patients were freezing to death. The hospital-issued pyjamas and blankets were of poor quality and failed to provide adequate warmth.
He slammed the hospital for taking a year to repair its electricity infrastructure while nearby private hospitals resolved similar problems within a month.
These shortcomings should never have been allowed to prevail; the patients who died could still be alive today.
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