Serious accusations against Mackenzie Hospital

Oct 05, 2016 Letters

Dear Editor;
I must first complement the few outstanding nurses at the A & E Department of the Mackenzie Hospital. There are many in the department but only a few courteous ones. Anyhow let me get to the really disturbing conditions of the hospital!
Lack of/ unavailability of sheets in the A & E. Can you believe there are times when there are no sheets for the beds? I witnessed two nurses removing a sheet from a bed to wrap a person who had just died! Then you know what happened? An elderly patient was brought in and had to be placed on the cold leathery material of the hospital bed to lie on.
One patient was pregnant and experiencing Hyperemesis Gravidarum (clinical term for severe illness in pregnancy) and the one medication to provide relief had expired and NOT ONE staff noticed until the patient was shown the medication and saw that it expired. My question is; if that patient was unable to afford that medication, what would have happened to her, since her condition can be life threatening?
The washroom facilities… those are an embarrassment to what is supposed to be a health institution. I’ve seen better facilities at Stabroek and Demico. Based on what several persons working at the institution have told me, the janitors are very lazy. And that can be attested to the fact that when they do clean, they do not reach the brooms and mops under the beds in the A & E. One can always find used pieces of gauze, cotton wool, needle covers etc under the beds.
These janitors can be seen idling about and mingling with patients during working hours. If not, they are in the maids’ quarters where their loud, vulgar laughing can be heard by patients passing. And no one can tell them to clean twice or they will get the finest “cussin.” Government pays these people to work EIGHT hours a day. They spend at most TWO hours cleaning. The rest of the day is spent without working. No wonder the hospital is dirty.
People say the janitors don’t get paid enough. Then that’s an excuse not to work properly. I guess teachers and other government workers too should work the same way these janitors work since most of them are underpaid.
Editor, you take a visit to Dr. Balwant Singh’s Hospital any day of the week! That hospital is ALWAYS clean because the cleaners WORK. They are always visible to clean messes and the toilets are regularly checked to ensure they are clean and not out of toilet paper.
As for the laundry department; that’s a big joke. How come it closes up by 16:00 hrs? No wonder they keep running out of clean sheets. They need to invent a shift system and put reinforcements in place to ensure the laundry department actually does what it’s being paid to do.
Well the drug situation is country wide. I just worry when the hospital runs out of things like panadol, cough syrup and other basic drugs. My grandmother says “when yuh want dead, go Mackenzie Hospital.” I now see what she meant!
Concerned Citizen

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