Download PDFCommunity Healthcare Workers at Kwamhlanga Community Healthcare Centre (CHC) in Mpumalanga are worried about the process of renewal of their contracts. They are worried because management told us that “we are too many,… we don’t work” and that they want to “cut us”. Sometimes they [the Health Department] tell us that we are are not good for this job and this is very painful because as CHWs, we do our best at our job.
Now they say we must refer patients for COVID-19 testing among other things. But if the patient doesn’t come to the clinic for the referral then we are told we are not doing our job.
Sometimes the people employed to be data capturers do not do their but we are blamed because we are the ones who go into the community to trace people and check if they are taking the necessary treatment. Sometimes when we go out, the patient blames us and tells us that we don’t know our job.
In terms of COVID-19, now we don’t have many people that are testing for COVID-19 because many have gotten vaccinations. Some patients have said the vaccinations worked for them but some of the patients say the vaccinations made them sick, and even made their relatives sick who got vaxxed. Many in the community are vaxxed and now nurses have been going to schools to vaccinate schoolchildren. This process has been very challenging because the parents sometimes say their children must not be vaxxed because they think we want to kill them.
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