members.
By the end of the Mandela presidency, the health of South Africans was
blighted by major setbacks. The government did provide access to health
care for thousands of people who had never had it before by shifting lim-
ited resources from expensive city hospitals to clinics in the rural periph-
ery, where doctors were extremely scarce. There was, however, a serious
deterioration
in the quality
of the public hospitals,
including Barag-
wanath, a large hospital in Soweto built for Africans in the apartheid era.
In May 1999, deputy president Thabo Mbeki visited Baragwanath
and
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