Upington Hospital Contact Details

For a medical emergency in Upington, call 10177 for an ambulance or 10111 for the police. Do not spend time looking up a hospital switchboard first; an emergency number reaches a dispatcher who knows which facility can take you.

The hospital in Upington

The public hospital serving Upington is Dr Harry Surtie Hospital, the district and referral hospital for the Upington and Mier sub-districts in the Lower Orange region. It replaced the older Upington Hospital, which is why searches for the old name still lead here.

What the province actually publishes

Northern Cape Department of Health switchboard: 053 830 2100 or 053 830 2500
Hours: Monday to Friday, 07:30 to 16:00
Physical address: 144 Du Toitspan Road, Belgravia, Kimberley, 8301

That is the whole of it. Unlike KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga, which publish facility-by-facility contact tables, the Northern Cape Department of Health publishes no per-hospital numbers on its own website. There is therefore no first-party source for a Dr Harry Surtie switchboard, and the numbers circulating on business directories are not reproduced here for that reason.

If you need the hospital directly for something non-urgent, the provincial switchboard can route you, and the hospital reception can give you its own number once you have reached it. That is slower than looking up a directory listing, but a directory number that rings unanswered in a decommissioned office is slower still.

Going to the hospital

Take your identity document, and the patient identity document if you are accompanying someone
Bring any clinic card, referral letter and current medication, including the boxes
A district hospital works on referral from a clinic for non-emergency care; arriving without one usually means a long wait or being sent to a clinic first
Emergency cases are triaged by severity, not by arrival time, so a long wait can mean your case is not the most urgent one in the room

What a public hospital may charge

State hospital fees are means-tested under the Uniform Patient Fee Schedule, and the assessment is done from your income. Emergency care may not be refused because you cannot pay: section 27 of the Constitution provides that nobody may be refused emergency medical treatment. Bring proof of income if you have it, because it determines your fee category rather than whether you are treated.

If care goes wrong

Every public hospital is required to have a complaints procedure and a complaints box or officer. Lodge it there first and get a reference. If it is not resolved, the provincial Department of Health on the number above is the next step, and the Office of Health Standards Compliance takes complaints about the standard of care at any health establishment in the country, independently of the province.

For a matter involving a specific practitioner rather than the facility, the Health Professions Council of South Africa handles conduct complaints against registered practitioners.