Walking through the Georgetown Public Hospital becomes an experience of profound despair. The Men’s Surgical Ward, for example, houses ailing men in rooms occupying six beds each, with the concrete floor cold and bare.
The Ward lies in one of the newer wings, and exudes an air of promise, except that patients must endure some sub-par living conditions.
The concrete floor in the rooms and along the corridors remains bare concrete. Patients must walk on this bare, hard, cold concrete, and last week a young man and his wife shuffled along through the winding corridor from his hospital bed to an operating theatre at the other end of the wing. Bare-foot and clad in a loose gown with his back exposed to all, the man obediently followed a nurse, nervous about his pending tonsil operation, his toes raised off the floor.
Patients, most clad in poor clothes, unkempt and unshaven, looking poor and meek, sit or lie on their beds in quiet submission, uncomplaining. When they swing their feet from the bed, they encounter the coldness of the concrete floor.
When one considers the billions of dollars Central Government budgets for the health care sector every year, and the massive amount spent to build this wing of the hospital, one feels a loss for words to rationalize the authorities not covering the hospital floor.
Who constructs a building to house people, and leaves the floor uncovered? Would a layer of carpet or some floor material be too expensive for Government to cover the hospital floor?
Citizens overlook these little things, and put up with sub-standard public service, including the arrogance and superior attitude of those who serve citizens. Would a top Ministry of Health official, or a nurse or doctor serving that wing, submit to being a patient at the Men’s Surgical Ward?
We treat our ordinary citizens with such disdain and disrespect.
The Ward houses some old citizens, now sick and needing their society to provide decent health care. We treat these citizens, many of whom worked hard for decades as cane-cutters and in other jobs, now subjecting them to such second class status.
One man, his feet bandaged and wheeling about the concrete floor in a wheel-chair, said he’s been in the Ward for “over six months”. In his 60’s, he suffers from diabetes, and said a doctor told him that his foot must be amputated. He has no idea when he would lose the leg, but gaily flirts with female visitors and nurses, undaunted in his despair.
He’s so accustomed to the conditions that he no longer complains, although he said a week ago he “cussed loud and even threw a bottle” because he got frustrated and fed-up.
Our society treats its citizens in public spaces, and through the public service, with scant regard. We suffer the vulnerable of the society – senior citizens, the poor, the sick, the destitute, the disabled, the deranged, the homeless – to go through such terribly inhumane treatment that they lose their self-respect and sense of human dignity.
Such comments as these provoke incredulous responses from those accustomed to these sub-standard conditions. Nurses, doctors and administration officials of the hospital react with consternation when they hear views criticizing the condition of the hospital, noting that Government spent vast amounts of money to build spanking new structures.
Yet, even nurses work in the conditions with hardly a complaint. Nurses congregate to complete paper work, on a counter top, with a built-in desk-like structure. They sit on mobile chairs.
Couldn’t a room be built for nurses and doctors to do their paperwork? Couldn’t a comfortable space be provided for health care providers?
Below the state of the Ward, and much of the rest of the hospital, lurks the shocking lack of awareness, and the passive acceptance, of sub-par standards. Our people no longer see these things. We no longer feel the state of our despair.
Guyanese become numb to the nastiness in our city, and despite resounding cries echoing from all corners about the deranged folks decorating the pavement of our Parliament buildings, we become blind to such anomalies.
Veteran journalist Francis Quamina Farrier filmed the scene on the Parliament sidewalk, and aired it on a local TV programme last week. The rest of the nation ignored the ugly sight.
It’s one thing to encounter the ugly public spaces, such as Stabroek and Bourda markets. It’s quite another to encounter such disregard for basic human dignity in a setting like a public hospital.
What kind of society have we become, to not care about these little things anymore? We condition our reflexes to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to these destructive ways, to the belittling of our citizens, to such barbaric treatment of our own people, to the inhumane taking away of the human dignity and self-respect of Guyanese, in their own homeland.
Despair lies everywhere we turn in this society, with citizens readily complaining of sub-standard public service. Public service plays a crucial role in any society. To ignore niceties and refined delivery of public service is to deny citizens a fundamental expectation of human dignity.
When the public hospital fails to respect the human dignity of patients – especially senior citizens who worked their whole life in this country, and who now expect us to treat them with a kind hand – we fail as a society. We fuel this unnecessary despair in the hearts of our citizens, who grow numb and unfeeling because the psychological pain becomes too much to bare.
We cannot even buy wheel-chairs for our ailing people, and depend on charitable handouts from a foreign religious organization, to provide such a basic necessity in our national public hospital.
We must face the despair we fuel in our citizens. We must feel and see the conditions that we force our people to dwell in. We must exercise good conscience in this society if we want to build a great Guyanese nation.
That cold concrete floor at the Men’s Surgical Ward stands out as a graphic symbol of how inconsiderate we act towards our own people.
