An estimated 6,000 South African children are born each year with congenital heart defects. Most of them will eventually reach a public hospital waiting list. Some will not survive long enough to get there.
It is a crisis that receives almost no public attention – partly because the children affected are very young, partly because the need is diffuse, and partly because there is no simple fix. Cardiac surgery on children is technically demanding, expensive and requires not just a surgeon but an entire team: anaesthetist, perfusionist, paediatric nurse, intensivist.
In collaboration with a cardiothoracic surgeon at Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital in eThekwini, Lenmed established the Children’s Cardiac Foundation for Africa. The foundation identifies children on public hospital waiting lists, prioritises those in urgent need, and brings them to Lenmed facilities for surgery – using down-time theatre slots, with specialists and nursing staff volunteering their time.
Ninety-two percent of fundraised income goes directly into patient care. The programme performs approximately 20 surgeries a year, with a survival rate of 98%. Some children are flown in from elsewhere in the SADC region, identified during community outreach visits. The ambition is to reach 50 cases per year, then 200.
Between 2004 and 2013, Netcare started the Walter Sisulu Cardiac programme at Sunninghill hospital, and in 2013 this agreement evolved to a collaboration between the Netcare Foundation and the Maboneng Foundation, resulting in 574 children receiving life-saving heart surgery.
Where others don’t go
Lenmed’s cardiac programme is one expression of a broader pattern across the sector: programmes that the private sector runs not because there is a business case, but because there is a human need and no one else is meeting it.
At 3am on a Tuesday, a woman arrives at a Netcare emergency department. She has been raped. She has no medical aid. She does not know where else to go.
She does not have to know. Every one of Netcare’s 38 emergency departments has a dedicated sexual assault centre – staffed, equipped and operational around the clock, at no cost to the patient whether they’re on a medical aid or not. Since 2001, those centres have seen and treated approximately 17,000 survivors.
The programme won the inaugural Trialogue CSI award. And it continues to run despite ongoing challenges with the police service over forensic evidence protocols, because stopping it is unthinkable.
Life Healthcare also actively involves its employees each year, mobilising teams to pack toiletry bags that are distributed through trusted partner organisations to women and children who have survived gender-based violence. These small but meaningful acts of care offer comfort, dignity and a sense of hope at a time of acute vulnerability.
Netcare’s human milk bank programme operates with the same logic. The group runs four milk banks nationally, including one at Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital – a public facility – which Netcare funds, governs and staffs.
Breast milk keeps very low birth-weight babies alive where formula cannot. A third of the milk bank’s recipients are public-sector babies. The cost of pasteurising a single litre is approximately R3,500, tracked through a full QR-coded governance chain.
A box for the hardest day
On 13 October 2023, Crystal-Lee and her husband welcomed their daughter Aleiyah into the world. She was born full term, 2.6kg, with black spiky hair and beady eyes. At her 20-week anatomy scan, she had been diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart – a rare condition affecting about one in 10,000 babies, with no direct cause and no cure.
For 20 days, her parents spent 12 hours a day at her side in the neonatal ICU, surrounded by nurses they would come to think of as angels. Aleiyah passed on 1 November 2023.
On the day they said goodbye, Netcare Sunninghill Hospital gave the family a Hope Box.
“I could not believe that a stranger could understand the magnitude of what had just happened to me,” Crystal-Lee recalls.
The box contained a candle, bath salts, a journal, a pen, a mug – practical things, carefully chosen. Inside was also a personal letter from Hope Box Initiative founder Nanki Robbertse, and her contact details.
Crystal-Lee reached out. She was introduced to a group of mothers who meet monthly to decorate boxes for other grieving parents.
She is now one of them – decorating boxes, supporting other women through the same loss, honouring Aleiyah’s memory by making sure other families are not left alone on the hardest day.
“The Hope Box Initiative changed my life and the trajectory of my grieving,” she says. ‘I had somewhere I belonged.’
The Hope Box programme sits alongside Netcare’s broader bereavement support offering, which includes training for clinical staff and the angel gown initiative – repurposing donated wedding dresses into burial garments for babies who do not survive.
Hearing the world for the first time
The Netcare Foundation’s cochlear implant programme has assisted 108 people since it began – a small number by some measures, but each one representing a life fundamentally changed. A cochlear implant device alone costs approximately R250,000; the programme covers the device, the surgery and the rehabilitation.
Zara Ebrahim received her implant as a young child. Before it, she lived in silence – unable to develop spoken language, unable to engage with those around her, unable to attend a mainstream school. After it, she learned to speak, developed language skills, and eventually won a speech contest at her school’s annual competition.
Fayaaz Otto was implanted at 15 months and was forming words with the help of therapy shortly afterwards. For his father, the gratitude is without end.
“For me, this programme is an entry into conversations and relationships,” says Dr Nceba Ndzwayiba, Director of the Netcare Foundation. “It helps people who would otherwise live very complicated lives.”