17/09/2025
Groote Schuur Hospital is in the middle of building a brand-new Emergency Centre, a once-in-a-generation project that will give patients the care and dignity they deserve when they are accessing care for emergencies. But without the right equipment the Centre won’t be able to function optimally. Dr Annemarie Kropman, Head of the Emergency Unit, explains why the build is so urgent and why we need the public’s support.
Q: Can you tell us about the new Emergency Centre?
“The project started in about 2012 with the drawing up of diagrams. These were revisited in 2019 and then they started building last year. It’s being built where the ambulance parking trauma deck was.
Phase one was finished last year and we’re currently in phase two, which entails the construction of the trauma and non-trauma side. Completion should be in February next year. Phase three is when we will move into the new Emergency Centre and start using it, and that is when the majority of the equipment has to be functional and ready.
The current trauma centre is being repurposed as a radiology department for emergency patients, and the non-trauma side as a referral centre for various disciplines.”
Q: What equipment will the new Centre need to function optimally?
“To be functional, the Emergency Centre requires certain equipment. This includes things like the Lodox (X-ray imaging system), ultrasound machines, and cardiac monitors, all critical for the running of an emergency room. But even minor items, like patient trolleys, are critical.
Unfortunately, we now know there isn’t enough money for the list of equipment required. It’s been quite a blow. So we have a funding gap, and a massive requirement to get support from the public and private sector for the items that will make the Emergency Centre function optimally.
Groote Schuur is a tertiary emergency centre, there’s a certain service we should be able to provide, but without the correct equipment we will not be able to do so. That’s the bottom line.”
Q: What is the situation like in the current Emergency Unit?
“Currently Groote Schuur’s Emergency area has two parts, trauma and non-trauma, and both areas see a huge number of patients. But both have outgrown their capacity and purpose. Patient numbers have been increasing because of a growing local population and a growing number of people falling off medical aid, while the degree of patient illness has also been getting worse.
The facilities are very old and the building is run down. It’s difficult to keep fixing and remodelling. Because this is such a small area for the amount of patients we see, there’s never the opportunity to make something better because we can't move the patients anywhere else.”
Q: What pressures has equipment been under in recent years?
“The facility took a big knock during Covid. This area received the patients with acute Covid and respiratory issues, and our emergency equipment was put under extra pressure.
For example, the cardiac monitors had to see us right through Covid. Some of them are from 2006, so they were quite old already, and then because they had extra use they started breaking. There are no repair parts. We’ve repurposed what we can, but it gets to a point where there’s nothing more you can do.
Medical technology moves so quickly, and a good example is the ultrasound. It’s now a vital function in an emergency centre. But we only have one ultrasound, and it’s being used for almost every patient coming through the door. It also had to go through the whole of Covid and we haven’t had the funds to buy a new one.
We’ve been using our very limited financial resources to buy absolute essentials, but we’ve been waiting and making do until the launch of the new Emergency Centre. We try to overcome as much as we can, but there’s a point at which we won’t be able to fix the next monitor that breaks.”
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Help us equip the new Emergency Centre and give Dr Kropman and her team the tools they need to save lives. Click here to contribute: https://www.gshtrust.co.za/donate
