I WAS recently admitted to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital.

I WAS recently admitted to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital.

The doctors and nurses who attended to me were great in spite of challenging circumstances (shortage of pyjamas, linen, medical supplies, bread for patients and geysers that worked erratically.)

They deserve salary increases of about 50percent.

But the hospital pharmacy was too, too awful. On the day I was discharged I was denied medication by three black pharmacists because the script was supposed to have been forwarded to them by a ward nurse.

The procedure at the pharmacy is that a ward nurse has to submit the scripts of all the patients to be discharged at 8am and the medication will be delivered to the ward at 4pm.

Imagine being discharged at 8am and then having to wait for eight hours for medication.

The Bara pharmacy doesn't care whether discharged patients have to travel long distances or that the nature of their illness - in cold weather - is badly affected by stupid, inflexible bureaucratic red tape.

I was told that if I needed my medication immediately, I should join the queue of 500 people from the outpatients clinic. Some of these patients struggled for two to three days to get medication.

The system at the pharmacy is chaotic, inhumane and lacks innovation and vision. It must be restructured, otherwise the poor nonmedical aid patients from the community of Soweto will forever be subjected to a disastrous, humiliating and self-defeating system.

DS, Orlando