Dear Editor,
I turned up at the New Amsterdam Hospital Dental Clinic, taking time off from my work to have a filling done, only to be told that there was no dental chair and I would “have to check back next month.” This is most horrible since I was waiting to have this procedure done for over a month; I was on a waiting list at this clinic. I have heard horror stories about services (and medication) not being available to the general public, and here was my first experience of that.
I would like to know what is really going on at this hospital. Why isn’t there a chair at the dental clinic? Where is the new one and why was it not installed? What really is being done at the dental clinic in the meantime? Where is the staff? What will be done to those persons whose dates have now expired? Will they be made to wait another couple of months to be seen? The attendant who spoke to me and told me to check back next month, behaved as if I was distracting her from knitting. That’s the nonsense that goes on in these institutions.
For too long these complaints about shabby and poor services at the New Amsterdam Hospital have continued without cessation. The Dental Clinic must be made to operate in a more efficient manner. If not, the services should be decentralized to the numerous health clinics around the place, so that people won’t have to be waiting months just to do a filling. Why is the government spending so much money on healthcare, if this is the experience citizens have to go through? Something is wrong here. The hospital did not even have the courtesy, like any efficient institution, to telephone its patients a day or so before, and do the decent and thing to say not to visit since they don’t have a dental chair (as ridiculous as that sounds).
I am expecting responses from left, right and centre.
Yours faithfully,
Leon Suseran