New Amsterdam Hospital – this is a sick country

Aug 24, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – This is a sick country, with many very sick people in charge, as confirmed by the caption “IDB finds New Amsterdam Hospital in shocking state” – KN August 21). National leaders and Ministers of Health are always happy to tell us about how much they are spending on healthcare, and all the great things they are doing, but the ugly state of the New Amsterdam Hospital (NAH) mocks them, pains us, and inflicts huge humiliations on every citizen, whether they live in Berbice and make use of the NAH services, or reside elsewhere in Guyana.

What happened to our sense of pride that there are the terrible conditions at the NAH, and no Guyanese patient, no staff member, no visitor has registered any complaint or disgust? It should not take the foreign IDB to reveal the terribly unhealthy state of different areas at the NAH. Guyanese who go there ought to have been raising a ruckus, sounding loud alarm. We don’t expect anything from leaders and ministers, who should all hang their heads in the toilets that don’t work. Our filth-filled leaders take taxpayers’ money, and leave them existing in filth, but they are building infrastructure from loans and grants, and wherever else they can get money to put their dirty, greedy hands on. We recommend that when their PR departments and camera operators accompany them, they take snapshots of the surgical room walls, and then have the honesty to let all Guyana see the state of the walls. Any and everybody is quick to take pictures of developments on the streets, but when their own health and surroundings are involved, their phones and their minds freeze.

The Guyanese people are now so beaten into docility that they take anything that is shoved at them. Local leaders do it, and the foreigners have gotten into the tricking and beating down action, with ExxonMobil’s Country Head, Alistair Routledge, being the latest, with his best ever contract, while his company bleeds Guyana blind. Our leaders, ministers, and governments are sick, but that doesn’t mean that Guyanese have to catch their nasty sicknesses also. They borrow millions upon millions in American dollars for that same hospital, yet the harsh reality is the dreadfulness with which patients go there and have to deal with it when they seek cures.

Infrastructure and state of the art facilities and equipment are what Guyanese politicians love to boast about, but there is the biggest hospital in Berbice that makes all of them look like total fools, chronic liars, and the greediest of thieves. How else to explain the millions spent and the miseries that workers and patients going there have to live with? This is after 18 years of neglect, if not more. In this day and age, this is the Age of Oil in this rich country, patients are being treated in the stockroom, almost like animals being attended to by vets. We say ‘almost’ because it is likely that animals could be getting treated in more dignified surroundings than what sick and stressed human patients are now accustomed to at the New Amsterdam Hospital, and its stockroom.

If there are real leaders in this country, a Minister of Health with some sense of self-respect, they all should hang their heads in shame. They should all resign from office without a second thought, a moment of hesitation. And if there are Guyanese who still have a conscience and are insulted by what exists in New Amsterdam (and other places), then they would run every man jack of them out of office. When our people, some of them patients or family and friends of patients, fail to be sufficiently enraged, deeply humiliated, by what is going on at NAH, then they are also sick, but don’t know how much. There are some sicknesses that doctors and medicines can’t cure, for we have to do that for ourselves.

It is when individuals, communities and a society look deep inside, take stock, and say, we can’t live like this anymore. We refuse to contribute to our own degrading, will no longer inflict pain upon ourselves. We cease coddling the crooks we have for politicians, and we kick them into the garbage can.

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