Endless tricks in body touting business

It would be interesting to follow the research patterns of local playwright Godfrey Naughton based on his work over the years, but particularly now following his most recent production, No Tricks No Business.

Rarely do we find playwrights exposing what is critically wrong in our hospitals and shedding light on some of the more disturbing practices unfolding in the system. Some of us cringe at the idea of being admitted to the public hospital but never stop to consider that if we strip away the physical structure many things in local healthcare would look the same; consider the nurses and doctors that offer their services in both the public and private sectors.

Naughton’s play which was on at the National Culture Centre (NCC) last weekend brings into sharp focus the practice of touting dead bodies at hospitals — hardly an amusing subject — that has long plagued the public hospital and in more recent times, private ones.

Forget the signs you see posted on the gates and on the walls about prosecuting those who violate hospital rules and operate the touting ring; it happens! It is a despicable scouting game that involves hunting for as many dead bodies as possible for one funeral home or another, and has people up in the bosoms of the relatives of the dead.

Imagine you were just hit with the news of a death in the family like a ton of bricks, wham! And in a short while, a body tout is shadowing your every move from the hospital ward to the records department to the morgue, barely giving you breathing space and time to grieve.

It is a booming business, which Naughton exposes in No Tricks No Business, and though his frank account comes loaded with humour there are serious undertones about what is driving the “body touting”. He explicitly states that touts are in decline as the nurses have effectively managed to cut them out, and are now working directly with the parlours for a commission.

In the play, Nurse Jennybelle (Sonia Yarde) is the head nurse and ‘front woman’ for a ward at the hospital. Her duties, she rarely executes. But she can always be found hunting bodies — actually checking on patients to see who is about to draw their last breath — and arranging with parlours that fit the pocket of the ‘soon to-be deceased’. She works in collusion with patient Stumpy (Lydon ‘Jumbie’ Jones) who coordinates from the inside when she is off duty and also provides the outside links.

The business has reached such contemptible proportions that at least one tout is resident in the hospital at nights. We never see him in the play but we know him as “Goatface”. He sleeps in the observation ward as a cover but is there touting and arranging ‘business’ daily. It is hard to imagine this actually happening when someone you love is terminally ill and in hospital. But as difficult as it is to digest, it happens.

Naughton never implies it, but the fear is there if you ever consider that at some time you could end up in the hospital; what if a nurse would go as far as to hasten a death?

The body touting business is never seen as morally wrong, sick and plain morbid by Nurse Jennybelle, because “she has stayed back and served her country to work for a pittance and she has a house to build”.

There is little comfort to be had from the fact that it was merely a play because it brings into question a very serious issue that plagues our hospitals, even if Nurse Jennybelle finally comes to her senses at the end of the play.

She gets her house in the end from an unlikely source that was potential business to her — one of the patients in the ward writes her a cheque for $2 million. If only she had realized earlier that actually doing the job she was being paid for could one day result in such an act of generosity. (thescene@stabroeknews.com)