TAC asks why media missed its gap
The media has missed an opportunity to report on and expose working conditions in the public health care sector in their coverage of the large-scale public sector strike.
In their latest newsletter the Treatment Action Campaign draw attention to how the media has focused on the actions of striking workers but have not examined the equally, if not more damaging, responses to the strike by the state.
The newsletter reads: “The media has covered the intimidation and violent disruption of health services by some strikers. Rightly, such actions have been condemned. But there has been almost no coverage of the far more systematic and dangerous disruption of health services by government’s rash actions in response to the strike.”
The media has also failed to engage with the deeper issues that have motivated the strike – particularly among health care workers. Nurses, pharmacists and hospital and clinic support staff play a critical role in the health care system and yet they perform their tasks under extremely difficult working conditions for very little pay.
TAC has lodged a case in the Cape High Court to reinstate dismissed health workers in Khayelitsha. TAC is acting on behalf of patients with chronic illnesses whose lives have been placed at risk due to the dismissals.
According to Mandla Majola, TAC’s Khayelitsha co-ordinator, the dismissals will certainly lead to a human resources crisis and will affect “emergency, chronic, child and reproductive health services”.
Journalists have also been blind to how the strike offered a way to get in-depth stories about patient’s experiences into the public domain. While these stories are hardly ever granted space in the news media, the stories of patients such as those TAC is representing in this case are the stories that should have been filling the pages of our papers over the last few weeks.
One of the applicants in the case has an HIV-positive daughter who needs to collect her anti-retroviral drugs. Besides the detrimental effects the disruption in her supply of medication will have on her health, disruptions in the supply of anti-retroviral therapy can lead to the development of drug-resistant HIV. The same applicant has a son who requires medication for TB and similarly, if he does not have access to treatment could develop a drug-resistant strain. The woman also fears that other members of her family could contract TB.
By highlighting a story like this one, journalists can draw attention to how the government’s lack of support for health care workers has devastating effects. At the same time an article about treatment disruption can serve an educative role and can inform people about multi-drug resistant TB and HIV and how this comes about.
In an affidavit in support of TAC’s case, Dr Eric Goemaere director of Medecins Sans Frontieres in Khayelithsa, writes that the dismissals will cause “irreparable harm to thousands of individual patients in Khayelitsha, both adults and children with HIV/AIDS, who may become ill and die as a consequence of inevitable treatment interruptions [that] will limit their constitutional rights to life, dignity and health.”
While the case will certainly make the papers, it remains to be seen whether journalists will rise to the challenge of engaging with the life and death issues the case entails. Reporting the facts is just not enough - Kylie Thomas.