What started 10 years ago as Prof Jerome Loveland’s simple vision to improve the lives of children with burns this week culminated in the unveiling of a R26m state-of-the-art paediatric burns unit that rates among the best in the world.
The unit at Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital will give children with severe burns — who are generally disfigured and scarred — a better shot in life.
Loveland, head of solid-organ transplantation at the Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre, started the non-profit organisation Surgeons for Little Lives knowing that burns are one of the leading causes of trauma among children.
“It started as an idea when we didn’t have 5c. But we pushed on without funding and consulted with architects and plumbers, electricians and medical specialists and drew up the plans, designed the wards, did the costing and got everything done to the point where it was a spade-ready project,” Loveland told the Sunday Times.
This unit is a lesson from people with good hearts on what can be done when you work hard rather than just dreaming.
— Jenny Hoggarth
He said a Johannesburg woman, Jenny Hoggarth, had played an important role in bringing the project to completion — "a vision that had grown legs and had babies”.
Jenny Hoggarth said the project was inspiring.
“We are in awe of how it all came together. Visionaries, architects, fundraisers, builders, painters, plumbers, tilers, cleaners and security guards. They all showed up and did the work. Then came receptionists, nurses, doctors, researchers and students working together to make this a place of healing and their labour of love every day.
“It’s easy to dream and even easier to sit on the couch and complain. This unit is a lesson from people with good hearts on what can be done when you work hard rather than just dreaming,” Hoggarth said.
Some volunteers choose hands-on involvement — one artist offers patients art therapy, and some school children do community service at the unit.
Surgeons for Little Lives offers staff further training and burn care help and is focusing on an endowment plan to keep the unit operating in the long term.
Tiny, unsmiling toddlers and babies — some tearful, some sedated, some clenching their teeth as they rubbed their bandaged wounds — lay quietly in their beds as visitors walked through the wards at the launch of the unit this week.
The facility, which replaces a previous unit, has 11 ICU beds, 24 general ward beds, an operating theatre shared with the adult burns unit, improved air flow to minimise acquired hospital infections, improved dressing rooms with stainless steel baths, space for rehabilitative services like physiotherapy and occupational therapy, and public bathroom facilities.
The ward has vinyl murals on all the walls and bright images on ceilings above the beds. Staff have their own uniforms including yellow golf shirts emblazoned with a royal blue logo declaring “I serve with a smile”.
The deputy manager of the ward, Thabo Tsienyane, said some of the burns patients stayed for months.
“Most are here with burns that happened in household accidents involving kettles, irons, candles, boiling hot baths and electricity. Some are here for a long, long time and don’t get visited everyday.
"But it’s OK, because they are our family. We love all of them and we give them the care they need.”
Tsienyane is pragmatic and accepting of the fact that the young patients might suffer during treatment.
“It’s things that need to be done for their healing. Somebody has to do it,” she said.
Nursing staff and doctors said their specialised work is deeply fulfilling and desperately needed by the 600-odd patients they treat every year.
The ward has special metal baths in which patients are scrubbed to slough off dead tissue before sterile dressings are applied.
“It’s a horrible process, and so the wall murals serve as a good distraction, as you can ask the patient, ‘Can you count all the butterflies?’ or ‘Where’s the baby elephant?’” said Derek Harrison, head of surgery at the hospital.
“This is an exciting development. Not only can we offer improved care to patients in the local community and beyond, we have increased capacity for training, education and research.
"It’s where we can find new and better ways of doing the same old thing. Not even private practice can offer what we have here, as this unit is now among the best in the world,” he said.
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