By Alpha Abu
In January last year, I visited my cousin who was admitted at the Connaught hospital before he passed away. Two months later, I was at the hospital again, this time spending ten hours each day for nine days to look after my mother now of blessed memory. She was admitted at the Intensive Care Unit, ICU. And it was during those traumatic moments there that I got to know the many sides of Connaught hospital.
To start with, the porters there are doing a good job - getting the wards and the vast compound and courtyard cleaned in the face of the many patients being admitted to the hospital. The number of young doctors, fresh from the College of Medicine, is quite impressive. They tend to be very keen at treating the ever-growing number of patients being brought to the hospital. I hope they will not, in a couple of years, turn into arrogant and insensitive doctors who only pride themselves on serving the affluent.
It must be said that relatives of patients encounter very daunting challenges in honouring their medical bills. Nurses will tell you they have the medicines and they give you the options of buying from them or any pharmacy outside and they appear mostly polite in telling you so. Buying from the nurses could be a bargain, though some may try to take advantage of a desperate and despondent relative of a patient by inflating the cost of some drugs. In your stressful state, you don’t give a damn as to where the drugs are coming from. All you need is the recovery of your patient.
Also, what could be even more depressing for many is the sometimes endless prescription for drugs being presented to patients or their relatives by the doctors.
Like in every profession, there are nice and not so nice nurses and doctors. Many people accuse, particularly, some doctors of knowing that a patient would eventually die, yet they prescribe expensive tests and recommend that they be done at laboratories where they have some kind of a deal or interest. Whether that’s a genuine attempt to save a patient or a covert rip off, is judgemental.
Don’t get me wrong. There are doctors and nurses who offer their very best under very difficult situations. Some are just pure class as they will in a somber, responsible and dignified way tell you the grim fact that one’s loved one is only bidding time and hence contribute in preparing one’s mind for the eventuality and in effect saving cash for the funeral etc.
The rate at which patients die at Connaught hospital is quite alarming and discouraging. In just one day alone six corpses were removed from the wards and to the morgue, amidst the hysterical wailing of relations and friends. Some of the nurses say the required medical equipment are lacking and those available hardly function properly, especially at the ICU. You see the body of someone’s relation being taken away and you just shiver, thinking perhaps yours will be next!
However, a good number of our people die because they come to the hospital too late when the disease might have gone beyond any form of medical cure. Laboratory results sometime show ruptured lungs and disease-plagued organs by the time the sick are brought to the hospital.
Periodic medical checks could be just important, but how many Sierra Leoneans could afford going to private hospitals? And the government hospitals are often so full that one is discouraged going there to report a headache which could be something else, more than just that.
And there is no guarantee you would find a smart medical person who would recommend tests. And if tests are prescribed, paying the fees would involve some scratching of the head. Return home and take panadol is the most convenient solution, no matter whether it may be the sign of typhoid, diabetes or hypertension.
The scenario above is of the typical Sierra Leonean, used to just taking “quick- fix” drugs like panadol and even where they can afford it, they ignore going through tests. Just why some come to places like Connaught when it is just too late!
Let me play some fairness here by applauding those young and devoted nurses at the ICU. Despite its ill-equipped status, they really care for the patients most of whom are in a state of coma. They feed and keep them and the place very clean.
“Despite their state, they deserve care and dignity even if they are going to die”, a nurse told me. Some 90% of those admitted at the ICU would succumb to the arms of death, the same nurse claimed. A porter there made of the ICU an even more harrowing analogy on a day he had taken four bodies from there to the morgue, “this is a pit”. And fall into a pit you find it hard to come out of it.
And even you waiting on a sick relative at Connaught hospital will, at the end of it all, come away from that place never the same again.
(C) Politico 06/03/14
