South Africans take the December holidays seriously...
Nearly everyone joins the mass exodus home to luxuriate in the gene-altering heat of the Southern Hemisphere.
Around Tintswalo, the count-down begins in October, when shopping centres resurrect their balding strings of tinsel and cashiers gladly sweat under faux-furred Santa hats.
By the time the excitement reaches our emergency room, the festive edge has worn away, leaving a wake of drunken fist fights and broken bodies for our staff to patch back together. As the season peaks, so too does the severity of cases, where health problems that were neglected over Christmas deteriorate into complex emergencies that further challenge our limited resources.
All the more reason for us to push ahead with building Tintswalo's 💫FIRST High Care facility. This is a place for the sickest and most complex patients, who need continuous monitoring (now possible with our new patient monitors 😎).
Thanks (as always) to your donations, we were able to get the famous Heidi from Heidi Simply Sewing (who previously transformed our NEW emergency unit), to make us new mattresses and inter-bed curtains in SUPER durable, wipe-down PVC.
And she didn't waste any time, sewing them over Christmas to install on boxing day! 🎄
As the curtains need "Tintswalo-proof" unbreakable rails...there was only one option: Frikkie, the pole man.
Here he is expertly aligning our steel curtain rails in our BRAND NEW HIGH CARE room that YOUR donations have made possible.
New concrete floor (with hospital-grade polyurethane coating)
New ceiling
New splash/kick-proof skirting boards
New painted walls
New electrical sockets
New vinyl wall protection
New wash basin and plumbing
New beds
New custom made mattresses and curtains
New TOP-of-the-range super-durable patient monitors with ALL the bells and whistles
Certificate course for advanced life support delivered to 12 doctors
Please take a moment to appreciate the potential life-saving impact of these cheap, simple and sustainable interventions
It's a big deal.
Donate to help us extend this to the rest of the hospital...there's so much more to do!