Health and Wellness
- What is the turnaround waiting-time period for patients at (i) regional, (ii) district and (iii) tertiary hospitals in the province and (b) how many walk-in emergency patients have lost their lives in Western Cape hospitals while waiting to be attended by medical staff from 2024 to date?
(a)(i)(ii)(iii) All Western Cape hospitals apply the South African Triage Scale (SATS) in their emergency centres. This scale prioritises patients by clinical urgency. As waiting times are determined by acuity and real-time demand, the Department does not set different turnaround waiting-time standards for district, regional, or tertiary hospitals.
Hospitals monitor waiting times through surveys. These surveys are conducted across regional, district and tertiary hospitals and the data is not aggregated by the type of hospital. For the period April to June 2025, 15 hospitals conducted surveys covering 952 patient visits, with these recording an average total time spent of 3 hours 53 minutes including an average waiting time 2 hours 26 minutes and an average service time of
1 hour 27 minutes.
At the same time, 129 primary health care facilities surveyed 12 586 patient visits, these recorded an average time spent of 2 hours 54 minutes which includes an average waiting time 2 hours 15 minutes and an average service time of 39 minutes.
(b) The Department does not maintain a central statistic for this metric. Patients are triaged on arrival by trained staff, with the highest-acuity patients prioritised for immediate attention. Any death occurring while in a waiting area is treated as a reportable patient-safety incident and investigated at facility level through established clinical governance processes. Producing a province-wide count “from 2024 to date” would require a case-by-case review across all hospitals and is therefore not available in the format requested.
