Some things are just not right at GPHC

Jul 20, 2008 Editorial

Within recent times, there have been many complaints about the operations of the Georgetown Public Hospital. The most recent complaint was levelled by a woman who gave birth to a baby that was said to have been stillborn.

This woman claimed that she never saw her baby because she was under an anaesthetic. She said that when she recovered no one could tell her anything about the baby. Weeks later, after the woman went to the press and her predicament became public knowledge, the hospital duly went public with the fact that the baby was in the mortuary of the hospital.

If this is the case, then something had to be wrong. The woman must have been visited by relatives who would have asked about the baby. Certainly, the persons who asked must have not got any response, and being simple people, they would have muttered and moved on.

We argue that the hospital should have informed the mother instead of waiting until she went public. Another issue involved a young girl who died because the hospital failed to diagnose her ailment, and in the end the girl died.

The child’s mother said that she took her daughter to the hospital with pains, and after a brief period of observation the hospital gave the girl some medication and sent her home. A few days later, the child was rushed back to the hospital, and again there was nothing more to be had than some tablets. By the time the hospital recognized that something was seriously wrong, the girl was dead. She had succumbed to a ruptured appendix.

A week ago, there was this former officer of the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit who was discharged from the hospital having been taken there suffering from hypertension. The man died a few hours later at home.

We have had people who went to the hospital for hysterectomy and died, some haemorrhaging because the surgeons could not stop the bleeding. And in one case a woman died because she was given aspirin although she was allergic.

The problem seems to be the shortage of skilled medical practitioners at a time when the administration is boasting about providing a vastly improved service. The hospital is performing a series of new surgeries, the most recent being a kidney transplant.

The hospital is also supposed to be doing hip replacements and heart surgeries. Any facility that can do such things should be able to diagnose ailments. Indeed, many ailments could present the same symptoms, so that further investigation is necessary. This seems not to be the case at the Georgetown Public Hospital.

But for all this, the hospital has scored many successes largely because visiting doctors are coming home to share their skills and, as some say, to give back to the society. Some crucial surgeries have been performed, and the locals have had a chance to work with these visiting experts.

The problem, however, is that the locals often do not have the chance to practice what they have learnt, because on their own they simply cannot undertake the programme.

There is therefore the need for the experts. In Guyana, these experts are the consultants, who are spread thin because they often lend their services to the private hospitals.

So we come back to the problem of missed diagnoses, a situation that could mean life or death. We know that the staff at the Accident and Emergency Unit is hard pressed, given the number of cases the few doctors and the nurses have to see each day.

One is led to believe that, because of the pressure of work, the doctors are not paying enough attention to the people seeking medical attention. Perhaps this is why the man was sent home to die, and why the young girl died of a ruptured appendix.

Dr Leslie Ramsammy is making a lot of noise about the number of doctors coming back from Cuba. One can only hope that they undergo a successful period of internship and that they actually learnt their trade over the period that they were in Cuba.

It would not be unreasonable to conclude that many people died because enough attention was not paid to them. Just this past week, people who were seeking medical attention at the Georgetown Public Hospital opted to seek the services of the visiting doctors who are here as part of Guyana Watch. They claim that these doctors find their complaints while the locals cannot.

The same thing happened when the Americans brought a medical ship off the Guyana coast.

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Some things are just not right at GPHC

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