China enjoys a strong political partnership with South Africa, and this is Beijing’s latest show of soft power.
Lucy Mnyani told local media she was happy to see images of her unborn child for the first time: “I had been going to the day hospitals in Gugulethu and Langa [townships] and they never sent me for a CT scan.”
Another person who queued up, Joseph Williams, told national broadcaster SABC: “When you go the local clinic you sit for hours and hours before they help you, depending on your condition.
“Here the service was very quick so I’m grateful that I came. I actually got the results for what I came for.”
Officials say the ship has a capacity of 700 patients each day and the service forms part of a joint exercise between the South African and Chinese armies. The ship has 100 people on board with 300 beds, 20 intensive care beds, operating theatres, clinical departments and even a rescue helicopter.
The Peace Ark’s first two days saw pre-selected people being offered treatment before it was extended to the general public on Monday.
“We arranged with the night shelters to provide a service for people who live on the streets of Cape Town because they don’t have access to any healthcare,” Saadiq Kariem, head of Western Cape’s Health Department, told the BBC.
He added that elderly people living in care homes had also been brought in for medical care, and Western Cape health staff were offered wellness visits.
“From registering to completing my care took me an hour,” said Dr Kariem, who himself went for a medical check-up and joined the queue as an ordinary citizen.
“It’s something that would take much longer at our public healthcare facilities because you have many more people requiring services.”
A total of 57 surgeries have been carried out so far, a tiny dent in the province’s waiting list of 80,000 patients.
And this is in Western Cape province, which arguably has one of the best health systems in the country.
“These have been mostly orthopaedic, cataract and a few tubal ligation surgeries for women who no longer wish to fall pregnant,” Dr Kariem said.
The popularity of the Peace Ark is telling, said Dr Shuaib Manjra, chairperson of the Health Justice Initiative: “It shows the public health system in the province and in the country is not serving the people as it should.
“Often you find people spending an entire day at a clinic waiting to be seen. There are major backlogs at hospitals, budgets and posts are being cut, and often this results in people missing out on up to two days of work after waiting to be seen for a simple procedure,” he told the BBC.
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