This afternoon my wife visited a relation who was bitten by a snake last Saturday evening and rushed to KCH the same night. The young man was given pain killers, put on a drip and told to wait for a doctor. As of noon on Monday no doctor had attended to him!
A year ago a young lady was involved in a bus accident in Dedza and was rushed to KCN with a cut on her forehead. It must have been on a Friday evening. The wound was not attended to the whole weekend. Rather she was told that the wound would be stitched up come Monday. When Monday arrived the nurses said the wound was not clean and as such could not be sown - there was still grass and other foreign objects from the accident a few days earlier that the nurses never bothered to clean.
Now am not sure if this is a precedent but these two cases where people are not attended to over weekends raises some questions about the seriousness of the hospital staff in providing quality health care considering they are a big referral hospital. These two incidents sound like emergencies to me and to have them wait for days before being attended to by a doctor is sad, very sad actually.
whose to blame...the nurses, the Malawian health care system, the lax management at the hospital, the government, or our refusal to demand for better health care?
ReplyDeletecould be a mixture of all of them but management I think shoulders the biggest part of it all.
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