A recent three-day stay in hospital has illustrated to me precisely why there are so many medical negligence cases. I don’t have 101 complaints, but I can say, for example, that the nurse who had to operate my IV tube on the one particular night came in and told me, “Please bear with me, I don’t work in this Ward and I don’t know how to use the equipment.” She then promptly switched off the machine, after punching all of the buttons as if it were a casino slot machine, and reversed some of my blood up the tube!

Pipes were not sealed at other times, a pill which I know has to be chewed was given to me and I was told to swallow it and basically a multitude of minor mistakes took place all of the time. The reality is that doctors want to go home at 5 or 6 o’clock and leave a hospital or a clinic unmanned by professionals until the next morning and those left in charge, namely the nurses, are expected for R7 000,00 a month to work a 12 hour shift and keep people alive. If there is one lesson I learned it is that in future I will only go to larger hospitals that have doctors at the hospital 24 hours a day – most probably those with ICU trauma sections.