- Heart patient Angus van Wyk was worried when he was admitted to a state hospital in Johannesburg for an operation to unblock blood vessels.
- Would he be at the mercy of uncaring and incompetent staff, as grim accounts in the media recently told?
- But a top-class team of doctors at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital restored his faith in the public health system.
- The hospital’s head of cardiothoracic surgery, where operations are routinely done on organs like the heart and lungs, Tumi Taunyane, says they do exactly what private hospitals do — but it costs patients less.
Jessica Pitchford is Bhekisisa's TV and multimedia editor. She's been a journalist since the early nineties and has reported on some pivotal events in South Africa’s political history, such as the country’s transition to democracy and the work of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission.
Anna-Maria van Niekerk is Bhekisisa’s news editor. She joined the centre after six years as the managing editor of the investigative television show, Carte Blanche. Anna-Maria has an extensive career in in-depth health and human rights reporting and has been named both the Vodacom Journalist (2002) and Discovery Health Journalist of the Year (2010) for exposés on the selling of human body parts for muti in Limpopo and the devastating consequences of HIV denialism.
