APOLOGY - By Andrew Trench - Editor. TODAY this newspaper apologises for, and retracts, a report published earlier in July which claimed a Port St Johns hospital was so short of food that staff had donated their own groceries and had to beg from the community.

The report, published on the front page, also claimed patients at Isilimela Hospital had had no meat for weeks and were being fed dry porridge in the morning, dry bread and a boiled egg for lunch. Eastern Cape health department spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo denied the claims and, following publication of the article, produced photographic proof that our report was factually wrong.

He produced images showing that the hospital’s storeroom shelves were laden with meat supplies and other groceries.

The Dispatch conducted its own investigation into the reporting of the article, which included speaking to original sources for the report.

Our investigation showed that our sources were inadequate and our accuracy procedures were not followed. If they had been, the problems would most likely have been identified and the report not published.

An internal disciplinary process was implemented and the reporter, Lubabalo Ngcukana, was found guilty of bringing the paper into disrepute for the inaccuracies in the report.

The chairperson of the hearing ordered that the reporter be demoted and salary reduced.

The sanction is valid for six months and can be appealed.

Further, the reporter entered a plea of guilty on a charge of not having done an accuracy check on the report but was found not guilty of this as the policy had not been consistently applied in the Mthatha bureau.

Steps have now been taken to rectify this situation.

The reporter was found not guilty – "on a balance of probabilities" – on a third charge of having misrepresented himself to one of the individuals quoted in the report.

The chairperson of the hearing, Dispatch chief sales officer Liesl Elias, commented in her findings that while the reporter had acted in "good faith, he was naïve in believing everything he was told and did not properly interrogate his sources".

"The work produced by journalists is bound by a code of ethics which requires them to test the accuracy of information gleaned from their sources and to take every precaution to prevent inadvertent errors," she said.

We apologise unreservedly for this inaccurate report.