Dear Editor,
I think cabinet has made a wise decision in cancelling the Specialty Hospital which was under construction. If you look at the millions of US dollars which were slated to be spent on the construction and design of that hospital, they could have used that money to modernize all the regional hospitals with state-of-the-art equipment and rehabilitative care. Any successful health-care institution begins at ground zero and emerges as a quality institution providing better patient care to the common man and woman. Only the rich can afford to go to super specialty and private hospitals.
When you visit some of these hospitals in Guyana you find they don’t have the required minimum bed space according to international standards, which is about 120 sq feet per patient. Government should move to correct this because the patients are too clustered in the wards and the families have no privacy. Some of the government hospitals were built during the colonial days, and if you look at them with all the money budgeted year after year there has been little improvement. There are sometimes no elevators to take patients from the lower flat to the upper flat; patients are moved manually by porters.
Accident patients with serious head and back injuries have to be transported to the central hospital in Georgetown because the regional hospitals do not have MRI or CT equipment. Sometimes the injuries are so serious, by the time the patients get to Georgetown via ambulance they have died on the way. These things need to be corrected if we are to become a nation which cares about people’s health.
The people in the interior are the worst off when it comes to health care. The hospitals are poorly equipped and most times in the south they have to go to Brazil for treatment for serious injuries; it’s time now that this government modernized the health sector to give people quality health care. Sometimes we tend to blame the doctors and nurses for the death of loved ones, but the fact remains that our hospitals are poorly equipped for emergency cases, some of the theatres are outdated and the doctors and nurses have to work with what they have. The working conditions are deplorable, and the seating accommodation for visitors and patients at the outpatient departments at these hospitals is unbelievable.
Sometimes the patients have to stand in lines and wait to see a doctor or nurse to check their blood sugar and blood pressure. I have seen that many times at the Suddie hospital when I go there for my medical check-up. There is always a shortage of porters and nurses, and patients have to wait for long hours to see a doctor; some of them travel from as far as Tapakuma Lake, Mainstay Lake, Lima Sands and the Pomeroon River. You can see them in pain and it’s like everyone is always busy; some of the nurses are hostile when they talk to the patients or their families, and they need better training for dealing with members of the public.
Other nurses will go out of their way to help you, but I think all in all doctors and nurses are working under pressure, and the workload is too much for them. They have to do three persons’ work and this can be very stressful, which is why they are underperforming. Life could be easier for the patients, doctors and nurses if these hospitals had modern equipment and were modernized. The government is moving in the right direction by placing its emphasis on upgrading existing hospitals. There was a time when you went to these hospitals, there were no drugs and you were given prescriptions to buy them from outside. Lately I read in the media that simple things like insulin were not available at the New Amsterdam hospital.
Yours faithfully,
Mohamed Khan
