If you need medicine from South Rand Hospital‚ expect to wait up to 80 minutes.

That’s half an hour faster than the average accident and emergency patient would wait to be seen to‚ while outpatients can expect can expect to sit for up to 130 minutes.

Notices showing these “benchmark times”‚ said the Democratic Alliance’s Jack Bloom on Monday‚ are evidence of “one more failed promise by the MEC” for health in Gauteng.

“Queues at the South Rand Hospital in south Johannesburg have not diminished despite Qedani Mahlangu’s promise in July last year that all paper files would be replaced by an electronic patient management system‚” said Bloom.

He quoted Mahlangu as saying in her July 29 budget speech last year: “To further reduce patient waiting times and the loss of files we have launched a project at South Rand Hospital to put 2 000 patient files onto a real time integrated electronic system.

“Our objective is to ensure that every patient file is on an electronic system over this financial year. We are hopeful that this system will reduce the amount of time it takes to find a patient file to less than 10 minutes.”

Bloom said the the project “should have been completed by the end of March this year‚ but has now been abandoned as it appears that they under-estimated the work required”.

“An added disappointment is that the queue-reduction project at South Rand was supposed to be rolled out to other hospitals.”