Whose Hospital Is It, Anyway?

Tomorrow I go to the secondary hospital that's located far out west to do my third and final week of orthopaedics. I mentioned before how ugly this hospital is. To convince you, I've included a picture of one of it's 'corridors' in this post. Is it really a corridor if its roof is made of currogated iron and has no walls and floods when it rains? I don't know. This picture was taken after the corridor had been cleaned but before the garbage man had come to take the trash away. In the big white boxes are medical waste - used syringes and catheter bags and drip sets and such. In the plastic bags are non-medical waste: food and wrappers and paper and stuff. A lot of junk ends up in the gutters you see running alongside the brick wall (the brick wall is one side of a ward - picture shown). To clean these gutters out they are filled with water, and then someone sweeps all the rubbish to one end with a broom, after which it is placed in a plastic bag.

I've been to a few hospitals in this part of the country that have a very similar design. I think there was some contractor a few years back who got a fat government deal.

Sometimes the press come to these hospitals and like to make a big fuss about how appalling the conditions are. They take photographs of overflowing sharps containers and dropped food on the floors and rickety beds and wards that have no curtains. There are stories about patients having to bring their own blankets and sheets. I'll admit, there are aspects of the hospitals that funds could definitely improve - things like beds and curtains and linen can be bought, and this hospital design was probably not the best idea. But people also need to remember that a hospital is run not only by the hospital management, but also by the doctors and nurses working in it, and the community it serves. Carte Blanche did an interesting story tonight about the state of Eastern Cape schools. One of the important points the article brought out was how much of the vandalism and destruction of property can be attributed to members of the communities surrounding the schools.

I remember a gynaecology call I once did in fourth year. At one point in the evening, I was climbing the stairs to the ward. In front of me were a group of visitors, off to see a patient. They were eating takeaways as they walked, and the one man had a paper bag full of french fries. Every now and then a fry would not survive the journey from the bag to his mouth, and would fall on the floor. I watched as the people behind him stepped on his dropped fries and crushed them into the ground. The hospitals I work in are cleaned - I have personally seen the cleaning teams that come in at night to polish the floors and empty the bins. I've also been yelled at many a time by ladies whose wet floors I have just walked across.

As for the linen, once again in the hospitals I've worked in, there is enough for all the beds. I'll admit that perhaps there isn't sufficient linen to provide as many changes as what there should be, and that the stuff the hospital does have gets stolen, lost or damaged by a variety of people. I've seen an anaesthetist cut the waistband of her scrubs trousers because it was too tight. I didn't ask her why she didn't go back to the change room to find a larger pair.

My friends and I are also responsible for wasting where we shouldn't - whilst dropping a twenty millilitre syringe into a sharps bin might not seem like a big deal, we don't consider how much could be saved by putting that syringe into a large medical waste box, so that far more needles can fit into the sharps bin, which is more expensive to dispose of. I often use a sterile glove as a tourniquet because I keep losing my own and because I can't find non-sterile ones. These gloves are extremely expensive, and should really only be used when absolutely necessary.

My point here is that the wellbeing of a hospital is dependant on the workers within that hospital, as well as the community it serves. Blame for circumstances within a hospital cannot be laid at the feet of any single party. We each need to do our own little bit to take care of these buildings and the property within them if we are ever to be able to say that we are proud of them.