A 39-year-old man collapsed and died on Monday morning, a few hours after he was discharged from a local hospital in Louis Trichardt.

Mr Marshal Pfende was admitted to the Louis Trichardt Memorial Hospital on Sunday night. Pfende, a Zimbabwean national, was ill when he visited the hospital that night and, according to the people who accompanied him, he was admitted.

When contacted for comment, Vhembe District Department of Health´s Communication and Liaison officer Mr Kutelani Sigidi confirmed that Pfende was indeed brought to the hospital on Sunday night. "According to our records, the man visited the hospital and was attended to by a doctor at casualty. The problem was that after he has been checked and put on a drip, he refused that a test to be done on him, and he told the doctor that he wanted to leave," he said.

He added that the doctor then decided to give him a refusal of treatment form (HRT), which Pfende completed before he went out of the casualty. Sigidi could not confirm where Pfende had slept that night, but outlined that he did not sleep at the hospital. This despite the fact that a taxi driver who gave him a lift picked him up at the hospital´s main gate. A source close to Mirror said that Pfende slept at the main gate of the hospital.

Sigidi claims that Pfende was no longer under the hospital´s treatment because he had signed the HRT form.

Similar incidents had been reported at the very same Louis Trichardt Memorial Hospital in the past. In October 2006, a woman gave birth in the street after she has been turned away from the same hospital by doctors.

Although a close friend of Pfende revealed that a doctor had told him he was suffering from malaria, Sigidi dismissed the claim, saying that it was not known what he was suffering from, because no tests were conducted.