NO discrimination - Criminals, victims get same treatment at KPH
Published:Monday | July 17, 2017 | 12:59 PMNadine Wilson-Harris
Working in the Accident and Emergency (A&E) Department at the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH) is oftentimes so overwhelming that doctors rarely ever get to make a distinction between the perpetrators and the victims.
"About 99 per cent of the time, I don't know who is who, because it's not everybody that is a bad man, dress a certain way, [and] it's not everybody who is an upright citizen dress a certain way," said head of A&E at the hospital, Dr Hugh Wong, during a Gleaner Editors' Forum last Thursday.
The doctors accept that it is not their responsibility to play God and determine whether a criminal gets to live, and there are times when the perpetrator of a crime gets treated before his victim, depending on the seriousness of the injuries.
"There are certain protocols you follow for that. We treat the most urgent, and there are certain clinical things you look at to make that decision, so you are not really playing God.
"You work with your training and you look at the information you have in front of you and you make a decision. Whether you think that is the right decision or not, again, it's objective," explained anaesthesiologist Dr Ayanna Ennis.
.... When the patient is a relative
Doctors and nurses at the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH) last week told a Gleaner Editors' Forum stories of staff members treating their relatives or close friends and not realising this, because they were so focused on saving lives.
Medical officer Dr Renee Armstrong recalled one senior doctor pronouncing a girl with stab wounds dead, only to return shortly after leaving work to see the body again.
"We saw her come back and we said why you are back here? She said, 'I want to see the body' and she went in and she realised that it was somebody that she knew very closely and this is somebody that when you see her, she is always composed. She is a warrior, she is a soldier, and she started to cry right there in the emergency room," recounted Armstrong.
"She went about her job, she pronounced the patient, and it was after she left, somebody called her, and when she realised, it was someone she knew, she nearly lost it," added Armstrong.
SHOCK OF HER LIFE
One scrub technician got the shock of her life when she realised the case she was about to prepare for was her son.
"She was about to prepare to scrub into the case, and she saw the feet and she said, hold on there, that looks like my son's feet. When she went and looked at the face, that's when she realised it was her son," shared resident anaesthesiologist Dr Junior Green.
Director of nursing, Joan Walker-Nicholson, can't forget the day one of her colleagues' husband was rushed to the A&E by the police.
"While we were coming up, somebody was coming up with the gentleman's shirt, and just the shirt she saw and recognise. When she actually went down there, it was her husband. He was on duty and came in dead," she said.
The doctors say they oftentimes do not realise who they mended until after watching the news.
"Sometimes you don't find out until you have settled the patient and you turn on the television and you look and you see the perpetrator and you look behind you and you say, oh!" said Ennis.