Cape Town -The community monitoring organisation Ritshidze says sex workers and members of the LGBTQIA+ community continue to experience discrimination when seeking health services.
The organisation says they have interacted with over 9 000 key population members over the past three months in across 21 districts around the country, and the number of issues that they came across is that there is still discrimination and refusal of service delivery around sex workers and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Ritshidze researcher James Oladipo told eNCA that vulnerable groups are being denied services such as therapy, STI treatments as well as gender based violence treatment services and some of them are being chased away from these facilities.
“It is illegal to deny people access to health services and it is a breach of basic human rights. Our report shows that a significant proportion of a key population is being refused access into these facilities, 19% of our respondents are people that are using drugs, 12% are sex workers and 5% are members of the LGBTQIA community because they are part of the community.”
“We have incidents of people who are using drugs, and they are harshly refused access in most cases and they have been accused of stealing from other patients, and they are being sent at the back of the queues when visiting these facilities.
“Unfortunately the majority of our respondents rely on public health services,” Oladipo said.
Oladipo further added that the issue of attitude towards these groups has created a negative impact in such a way that they have stopped these facilities.
“Another reason is that they are afraid that their health statuses might be exposed in front of other patients.
“People are being victimised because they use drugs, they are sex workers, and they are part of the LGBTQIA+ community.“
“That’s why they are choosing mobile clinics or dropping centres when they are seeking health services because they argue that they are accommodative of them, unfortunately there are not enough dropping centres or mobile clinics in the country for every key population in order to access them,” Oladipo added.
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