A teen’s liver transplant rejection sparks debate on ethics, immigration, and who gets access to life-saving care in SA.
The dictionary defines the word “triage” as “the sorting of and allocation of treatment to patients and especially battle and disaster victims according to a system of priorities designed to maximise the number of survivors.”
On battlefields and the scenes of mass casualty events, triage can mean that medics have to make the gut-wrenching calls about who survives and who doesn’t… which injured person would be the best to invest effort and treatment in.
A form of triage also has to take place in an health system where there is simply not enough money to go around. It’s again a case of somebody – or some committee – playing God, by deciding where to allocate precious resources.
In the case of the Zimbabwean teenage girl allegedly refused a life-saving liver transplant by Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital in Johannesburg, a whole can of ethical worms has been opened.
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Do medical personnel – who swear, in the Hippocratic oath, not to discriminate against anyone on the basis of their nationality, among other things – have the right to refuse to treat the girl and, effectively, condemn her to die?
On the other hand, the more than R1.5 million which such an operation would cost could, quite conceivably, save the lives of other people. That those other people could, or should, be South Africans is a huge wrinkle in the debate.
The ANC’s failure to deal with illegal immigration over the past three decades has brought us here. It is not xenophobic to say that our state-supplied services in especially the medical sector are being overwhelmed by people who are here illegally.
Should our authorities be slammed for making these desperate triage decisions, when the blame could more fairly be laid at the door of a neighbouring country’s rulers who have looted it to collapse?
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