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Fear in the Healthcare – When foreign tongues abound

Jul 30, 2015 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
Firstly, as a 100% bona fide native of Eldorado, a foreign trained and fully qualified member of the health care profession with careers spanning two continents, I have become increasingly concerned about the general state of affairs in Guyana, especially the mortality aspect, but worse yet when blame is attributable to those who have taken an oath to save lives.
Freddie Kissoon in a recent article alluded to the incompetence of the Cuban-trained doctors as being a contributory factor to the loss of lives following non-life-threatening injuries.
This he further opines is due in great part to the linguistic barrier existing between Cuban doctors and Guyanese nurses.
What’s new? I dare ask. Certainly not this well-known fact, for it has done the tour, been repeatedly swirled around buccal cavities like mouthwash, and finally been orally ejected into the atmosphere.
Any rational thinking individual would concur with me that where human lives are concerned, or when talking of life and death, we had better all be on the same page, or at best, speaking the same language.
While the continued presence of the Cuban doctors may have been a boon to Guyana’s already beleaguered healthcare system, it has also served as the fly in the ointment.
The linguistic problem was just one of the many improprieties of which these doctors were culpable.
Records reveal that the then Health Minister Leslie Ramsammy had confirmed reports that he was the recipient of several complaints that the Guyana –based Cuban doctors had been soliciting and accepting gifts and fiscal contributions from their patients for medical services rendered.
Preferential treatment was also accorded patients who provided the doctors with the latest in technological innovations.
One of the key concepts at the heart of the Hippocratic Oath is the idea that a doctor will “do no harm”. Have these Cuban doctors replaced it with “I will do no harm, only charm”.
Some of these doctors have also been known to carry out their own private practice using the supplies from the hospitals. What a liberty!
It can readily be seen that these doctors have fitted in nicely, from all aspects of the word.
At the time the PPP Government of the day, entrenched through habit, was dipping and shipping, while on the same hand the doctors (seemingly taught by the best) in like conformity, were taking and faking.
Perhaps it is now timely to proffer the question, “Who was running or overseeing the running of the asylum?”
The Cuban doctors at a definite setback due to their linguistic incompetence, relied heavily on the Guyanese nurses for translation and clarification, yet, in the face of all this, the then Minister within the Ministry of Health, Dr. Bheri Ramsaran stated that the Cuban doctors had been exposed to English classes to help them interact with patients, but they never attended any classes.
This fact was personally confirmed by the doctors.
Human societies see what they want to see, a phenomenon that is called “turning a blind eye” according to psychoanalyst John Steiner.
He notes that often we have access to adequate knowledge, but because it is unpleasant and disconcerting we choose unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, to ignore it.
He used the Oedipus story to make the point. He argued that Oedipus, Jocasta, Creon and the “blind” Tiresias grasped the truth that Oedipus had killed his father and married his mother as prophesized, but they colluded to ignore it.
We too, Steiner wrote, turn a blind eye to the dangers that confront us, despite the plethora of evidence that if we do not radically reconfigure our relationships to each other and the natural world, catastrophe is assured.
This is a frightening state of affairs, one in which the stakes (human lives) are too high, one in which even Hippocrates would take umbrage at those who have taken his oath and are behaving like HIPPO-CRATES (hypocrites).
Yvonne Sam

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