Dead babies in laundry at Joburg Hospital

18 April 2019

I am horrified by the report of amputated limbs and dead babies being found regularly at the laundry of the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Hospital.

Workers at the laundry have complained for a long time about the stress of finding fetuses and body parts in the linen which is taken from wards and sent down a chute to the laundry.

Last week I wrote to the hospital CEO Gladys Bogoshi about the problem, including two horrific photos taken by workers - one was a fully formed baby, and the other a foetus covered in blood, but I did not receive a reply.

The hospital management has inexcusably failed to act by tightening controls to ensure that medical waste is safely disposed of.

Laundry workers work in terrible conditions and risk infection from medical waste that they are not meant to deal with.

I hope that urgent measures are taken to resolve this problem which highlights generally poor management in hospitals that the Gauteng Health Department has failed to address over many years.

Issued by Jack Bloom, DA Gauteng Shadow Health MEC, 18 April 2019