Blue Room to ease patients' pain

Imagine receiving the worst news you could possibly get from a doctor and it has left you so distraught your first reaction is to frantically rush out of the counselling room and roll around in the dirt in immense emotional agony.

For the staff at the Accident and Emergency Unit at the University Hospital Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI), such a scene is a reality for many persons who enter the facility, and one woman in particular.

"That is what stands out most in my mind when I think about why we need the grief room, because it was not a happy sight to see her outside rolling and rolling," said Dr Romayne Edwards in remembering the distressed woman.

Edwards, who also served as the project coordinator of yesterday's opening of a grief room at the UHWI emergency unit, hopes that such incidents will never happen again. So optimistic are the team that worked to make the grief room possible that they have dubbed it the Blue Room to euphemise sadness, invoke feelings of serenity and represent the colour of the Jamaica Medical Doctors' Association (JMDA), which sponsored the facility.

All smiles

Though the Blue Room is geared at allowing persons who receive poor prognoses or news of death to receive needed counselling and grieve in dignity, it was all smiles as Edwards cut the ribbon to open what JMDA President Dr Shane Alexis called "the first step in doing something tangible that will stand the test of time".

The Blue Room, though the size of a tiny office with a desk, a two-seat couch for patients and a single couch for a counsellor, might prove itself to signal huge things for Jamaica if Dr Alexis has his way.

"As far as we know, there is no other grief room or blue room anywhere in the public health-care sector, certainly not the calibre which we are handing over to the university hospital," Alexis said.

He, however, hoped that more blue rooms would be opened across the island soon to extend counselling services to those traumatised by sudden grief.