ArticleHealth and human rights2025
South Africa's Life Esidimeni Disaster and the Institutional Corruption That Opened the Door to It.
Article in Health and human rights, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
In mid-2015, the Gauteng Department of Health in South Africa canceled a contract with Life Esidimeni, a subsidiary of a large hospital group that ran four facilities housing almost 2,000 people with mental illnesses. The termination of the contract and the chaotic transfers of people that followed resulted in enormous suffering and 144 deaths. Mental health care users died in conditions of neglect-emaciated, dehydrated, unmedicated, and with bedsores and gangrene. Their rights to health care services, to dignity, and to life were violated. The Life Esidimeni disaster occurred within the context of institutional corruption: a systemic and strategic influence that undermines an institution's effectiveness by weakening both its ability to achieve its purpose and the public's trust in it. Considering the institutional corruption that was the context for the Life Esidimeni disaster-including the overlap of political and administrative functions and the drive to save money, disguised as a desire for deinstitutionalization-this paper examines the public and legal processes undertaken to expose the disaster, to secure accountability, and to begin to deconstruct the conditions that allowed one of South Africa's most shameful human rights violations of the democratic era.
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41536711PMC12799035What OpenQuestion holds
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