A faulty administration

Feb 20, 2016 Editorial, Features / Columnists

The Georgetown Public Hospital has long been the country’s referral hospital. Such has been its reputation that people, rather than visit the health centres, clinics and even hospitals in their communities, opted to travel to the city.
The hospital offers outpatient services as well as emergency care. However, very soon everyone considered his situation an emergency so the Accident and Emergency became an overcrowded centre. Until the then President Bharrat Jagdeo, with support from Minister Dr. Jennifer Westford, secured a scholarship to have nearly five hundred more doctors trained in Cuba, the pressure on the staff was enormous.
Some five years ago, Jagdeo announced that there would be no shortage of doctors at the country’s leading hospital, that the backlog and overcrowding at the Accident and Emergency Unit would be a thing of the past. Unfortunately, there were not enough beds at that section of the institution to afford the speedy care of which Jagdeo spoke.
The years have gone by and it would seem that the situation has worsened when it comes to people accessing medical care. A woman who suffered a miscarriage at Mabaruma was flown to the city on Thursday. She arrived at the hospital shortly after 9:00 hours but she was not even attended to until late Thursday night. How could this happen?
At the same time, a prisoner whose lawyer claimed that he had been beaten while in custody, was brought to the hospital mid-afternoon and in short shrift, was taken before a doctor. All this while, a woman sat bleeding and hoping to get medical attention. With miscarriages no one can underestimate the situation. But the nurses there, most of them women themselves, paid little attention to this suffering woman.
In every institution there is always someone who does the rounds. One such person did the rounds after receiving a phone call from the North West and got the needed help for this woman.
It is now being said that some of the people working at the hospital want to see the present administration fail. They are said to be people rooted in the past administration. The issue then becomes one of placing the health of people above partisan politics. Strange enough, the people in the health system took an oath to serve the people in their care.
And so we need to wonder about the nature of the administration. There is the argument that at hospitals there are bound to be hiccups and we are aware that such could be the case. In the United States there was the case of a woman being made to wait in the admission room until she died. Her death made the news.
There was also the case of nurses at another hospital refusing to treat a patient because that patient did not have medical insurance. The fallout was devastating. In Guyana the question of medical insurance does not arise. Medical attention is free at the pubic institutions so it all boils down to work ethic.
Not so long ago there was someone to monitor patient arrival at the Georgetown Public Hospital; this is now a thing of the past so people visiting the institution are more often left to the devices of the nurses who must process them. If the patient should show any disapproval there is the threat that no doctor would see him or her.
In a society like ours, one expects that this situation would require a political solution. Commonsense says not so. The situation demands a work ethic that would see a caring team of people. We have heard the horror stories coming out of the maternity wards. We hear of nurses refusing to attend to women in labour because the nurses conclude that the woman is “not ready”.
We would not go as far as to call for a revamp of the admission protocol but we would demand that there be a level of professionalism. After all, none of us knows when we could become a patient in need of medical help.

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A faulty administration

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