Lethem residents say they are skeptical that the visit by a team of six persons to the Lethem Hospital last week will result in the services provided at the institution being improved even as more complaints surface.
“No minister came to see anything. We don’t know these people and they did not even talk to the residents they just had meetings with the officials. What you think they would tell them?” one Lethem resident asked following the two-day visit by the team.
Stabroek News was told that the team was led by former local government minister Harripersaud Nokta and included Director of Medical and Professional Services at the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPH) Dr Madan Rambarran, Director of Regional Heath Services, Dr Narine Singh and Coordinator for the Indigenous Community Patricia Singh.
The team arrived in Lethem last week Tuesday following complaints reported in this newspaper about the poor services being offered at the hospital which some residents have labelled a “white elephant.” Residents had complained about the fact that the theatre, which is equipped with expensive equipment, has never worked since the hospital opened its doors and that there are only two inexperienced doctors, including the recently appointed Regional Health Officer (RHO), stationed at the hospital. This has resulted in many cases, including one where cotton wool was stuck in a patient’s ear, being transferred to Boa Vista, Brazil with fewer transferred to GPH.
Stabroek News has since observed that the door to the theatre is padlocked and concerns are being raised as to whether the new equipment inside will function later as the air conditioner unit is not working and most of the equipment should be stored at a cool temperature. Only the air conditioner unit in the pharmacy is working.
The visiting team, which left Lethem on Tuesday morning last, spent the two days in meetings with the RHO and Regional Executive Officer Donald Gajraj and other officials, including staff members at the hospitals and also observed the operation of the hospital.
According to residents, the report that the team is expected to submit to the Health Ministry cannot refute the complaints they raised even as a woman wept for her grandchild who died in his mother’s womb because of what she called negligence at the hospital.
No heart beat
Cleopatra Mc Donald on Saturday told Stabroek News that doctors at the hospital delayed the transferral of her 22-year-old daughter Petal Chow to Boa Vista and this she believed led to the baby being stillborn.
According to the woman, her daughter was only transferred after Dr Rambarran saw her and advised that she be transferred immediately even though the doctors there said that the woman just needed bed rest and that she should not be moved.
The woman said her daughter was transferred to Boa Vista last Wednesday afternoon, though she was admitted on Tuesday afternoon, and doctors at the institution said if she had been transferred a few hours before they might have been able to save the seven-month-old foetus.
A grieving Mc Donald told Stabroek News that her only child stayed with her in the interior where she operates a shop and a few months after she became pregnant they decided to visit Lethem for her to join clinic.
The woman said that on May 18 they visited the hospital and she was seen by a male doctor who informed them that he was unable to hear the baby’s heartbeat but advised that the woman join the clinic anyway. He told the woman that she was five months pregnant even though her mother insisted that the pregnancy was older.
It was a week later the woman started to experience pain and bleeding. She was rushed to the hospital and was seen by the same doctor, who this time around said he felt the baby’s heartbeat.
The woman was admitted and made frequent trips to the bathroom as she continued to bleed. An appeal by her mother for the doctor to have an ultrasound done to ensure that the baby was alright was denied.
“He said that even though they had an ultrasound machine there was no qualified person to operate it,” the woman told Stabroek News.
The woman said she begged for her daughter to be transferred to Boa Vista but the doctor refused reassuring her that all was fine with her daughter and the baby.
Early Wednesday morning the woman again appealed to the doctor for her daughter to be transferred.
“She turn and tell me ‘Madam what your daughter needs is bed rest if she is moved the baby will die’”, the woman said.
According to Mc Donald, an experienced nurse whom she knows also advised that the pregnant woman be transferred but the doctor again refused. She said she left the hospital to purchase a few items for her daughter and the nurse told her that she would attempt to get the visiting doctor from Georgetown to see my daughter.
The woman said less than half an hour after she called and told her that the doctor, whom she later learnt was Dr Rambarran, saw her daughter and advised that she be transferred immediately.
“When we reach the doctors there told us that the baby was dead and they had to operate and they also said if we had reach a few hours before the baby woulda been alive,” Mc Donald said.
The woman’s daughter is still in the hospital but she brought the baby’s body back to Lethem and was forced to purchase ice and keep it at her home because the hospital’s morgue is not working and has not been operational for quite some time. The child was buried on Saturday.
Meanwhile, a woman who would only give her name as Annie told Stabroek News that she almost died at the hospital last week after she was hospitalized suffering from hypertension and a “problem with my sugar.”
The woman said when her sugar count was tested on her admission it was at 356 and she was given some tablets and insulin and placed to lie on a bed.
The woman said about two hours later she begun to feel delirious and was profusely perspiring and cried out to the doctor on duty and when her sugar was again tested it was at 44.
“They became frantic and even ask me if I had sweetie in me bag to suck to bring the sugar up but they work on me and bring it up to 104,” the woman said.
She said she could have been a dead woman and wondered at the service being provided at the hospital.
But for Janice Torres, a teacher at the St Ignatius School, her experience at the hospital was a pleasant one and she praised the service that was provided to her. The woman was pregnant and went into early labour after she had a minor accident and was rushed to the hospital.
Her seven-month-old baby was born last week Thursday and both mother and child were released on Friday in good health.
“The treatment was good, everything was good,” the woman said.
