Dear Editor,
About 2 pm on Thursday, January 8, I travelled from Anna Regina to the Suddie Hospital to seek medical attention. As I entered the compound it was as though there was a strike; I saw the doctors and nurses in one corner sitting and conversing. No one was looking after the patients who I presumed had been there since 6 in the morning.
When I told one of the nurses who was standing at the entrance that I was there to do a medical check-up, she told me that the hospital had a blackout since early in the morning and the standby plant had not been working for months.
There is nothing the hospital staff can do because they cannot see as all the rooms are pitch dark. The operating theatre was down and no surgery could be done because there were no electricity; patients could not receive dressings and no tests could be done.
Families with their patients were told to come back another day when the electricity would be on. I was told the same thing. Some of these people had come from as far away as Supenaam and Charity only to be turned away. Many of them became angry and started to use expletives and behaved badly towards the doctors and nurses. One nurse told me that we must blame the administration for the hospital being in such a poor state, and that when patients died there the medical staff are blamed for negligence. However, no one knows the conditions under which they work, and she told me that many times there are no drugs and no blood in the bank for accident and emergency patients, so families were asked to donate blood.
Families are sometimes asked to buy their own drugs to save the lives of their loved ones; patients have to buy even simple things like urine and drainage bags.
I decided to venture further into the hospital to see if they were talking the truth about the visibility, but indeed inside was pitch dark and you could not recognize a thing. These doctors and nurses were right not to take any chances and jeopardize patients’ lives under those conditions.
I then left for home about 2.30 pm, and on my way I decided to stop at the Health Centre at Columbia. There I met the medex and her assistant, and I told them that I wanted to check my blood pressure and blood sugar.
Both of them were very kind and generous, but there was no one-touch ultra bloodstrip there to check my blood sugar, so I went home and brought my kit.
The medex did a comprehensive check on me, and both she and her assistant should be complimented for doing a commendable job under terrible constraints with no drugs there either.
I think she needs a porter, because they have to move some heavy benches and lift the disabled onto a bed which is very strenuous activity.
There is no magic formula or blueprint for achieving success in developing this hospital or the health sector. Success will be achieved by constant and strenuous application and commonsense by the Minister of Health. Backwardness is the direct cause of our poverty.
Yours faithfully,
Mohamed Khan
