S. Darfur hospital patients ‘have to pay for everything’

Patients admitted at the Nyala Teaching hospital in South Darfur claim to have to wait for “several hours” for doctors without being checked up, and to have to “pay for everything, even for drinking water”. In addition, they are condemning the deterioration of medical services offered by the institution along with a shortage of drugs, as some of them told Radio Dabanga. Besides the deteriorating medical services, according to patients, the Nyala Teaching hospital is witnessing a “sewage spill that always fills up the roads leading to the Grand market”.  In a separate event, the engineer Taj Elsir Mustafa Al Bunna, director of the Labor Union of South Darfur, is demanding the state and the central governments to pay employees’ arrears that is amounting to 201 million Sudanese pounds (about 45.5 million USD). Out that amount, he continued, 131 million pounds (almost 30 million USD) is to be invested in social security, pension funds and other resources. Al Bunna said he has not been able to so far meet with government authorities to discuss about scheduling the pending payments.Radio Dabanga file photo