Regional health threats

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Lusikisiki Village Clinic, situated in the impoverished province of the Eastern Cape, and originally set up by AngloGold Ashanti in October 2000 to provide primary health care for the families of mineworkers in this rural area in the Eastern Cape, has found a new lease on life in providing primary health care and anti-retroviral therapy (ART) to a broad range of community members.

The clinic was run until December 2004 by Anglogold Health Service (AHS). While treatment for mineworkers was free and family members paid a nominal consulting fee, the broader community was charged higher rates. As a result, community members tended to make use of the free facility at the government clinic, based in a modified container in the village. Despite having the capacity to treat in the region of 4,000 patients a month, the AngloGold Ashanti clinic was largely under-utilised with less than a tenth of that number presenting monthly.

In order to ease pressure on the under-staffed government clinic that serviced around 300 patients daily, AngloGold Ashanti made a decision at the beginning of 2004, to hand the facility over to the Eastern Cape’s Department of Health (DoH) for use as a community clinic.

This move is in alignment with AHS’s own revised strategy – while AHS will provide health care only in areas in which the company operates, AngloGold Ashanti would continue to fulfil its social responsibility obligations by forming partnerships with host communities, including those from labour-sending areas. Besides donating all the clinic assets and the existing clinic stock, valued at around R350,000 (US$54,945), AngloGold Ashanti also agreed to pay the monthly rental costs and a fixed maintenance fee to the clinic’s owner, TEBA, on behalf of the Eastern Cape’s DoH, for a three year period – valued at approximately R170,000 (US$ 26,688).

The clinic, which has a large waiting room, three consulting rooms, a pharmacy, counselling room and staffroom, was handed over to the DoH on 1 April 2005. With an increased staff complement comprising four professional nurses, four nursing assistants, two pharmacy assistants and two cleaners, the health centre, aptly renamed the Lusikisiki Village Clinic, is now able to provide a service to approximately 8,000 people a month.

Apart from providing primary health care, Lusikisiki Village Clinic was also chosen by the province’s DoH as a rollout site for the provision of ART. This is being provided in conjunction with the Eastern Cape DoH and international humanitarian aid organisation M?decins Sans Fronti?rs (MSF) – Doctors Without Borders – that assists in countries where health structures are either insufficient or non-existent. MSF launched its ART campaign at Khayelitsha Clinic in Cape Town and project leaders were seconded to the Eastern Cape in 2004 to administer and manage ART for HIV/AIDS patients presenting at Lusikisiki’s Village and Gateway clinics, as well as the clinic in Port St Johns. So successful is the programme, which has strong nursing and community components, that about 1,000 HIV-infected patients presented for free ART at these three facilities in the first six months of the DoH’s ART roll-out in the region.

Cognisant of the pressures government faces to provide primary health care for all South Africans, and in keeping with the company’s aim to focus on broader social responsibility and not solely provision of health care for its immediate employees and their families where possible, it is AngloGold Ashanti’s intention to further bolster its partnership with the Eastern Cape’s DoH by exploring similar assistance opportunities in other needy communities.