Bustamante Hospital needs more staff
Published:Sunday | March 20, 2011 | 12:00 AM
INADEQUATE STAFFING at the Bustamante Hospital for Children is severely hampering patient care, Dr Dayanand Sawh, head of the Orthopaedics Unit at the hospital, told The Sunday Gleaner.
The doctor pointed out that the Arthur Wint Drive paediatric hospital opened in 1963 with 250 beds, but 48 years later, the number of beds has not increased.
"Sometimes we have no bed space and the children sleep wherever we can put them," Sawh said of life on the orthopaedics ward at the hospital.
He explained that about two weeks ago, the situation got so severe that a few children had to sleep on stretchers for a night.
He commented that while Bustamante was stretched, the paediatric ward at the University of the Hospital of the West Indies (UWHI) had few patients and the management was considering closing the ward. Unlike Bustamante, the UHWI does not offer free health care.
The five-man orthopaedics team at Bustamante consists of Sawh, who is the only consultant, one resident, and two senior house officers. "That's it, and we are supposed to run a 24-hour service. It's really not enough," Sawh said.
Sawh has been at Bustamante since 2001. In his first year at the children's hospital, the team performed 999 operations.
Sawh is convinced that the social work unit needs at least 12 persons but should ideally have a staff complement of 24. "The social work department is overworked. The unit is too small and overworked. You need a much larger social work department. I think the Government has been turning a blind eye to this for a long while," he said.
Bustamante has two orthopaedics clinic days - Mondays and Thursdays - and on a full day, the team sees up 120 patients per day; on a normal day, a little over 100 patients turn up for the clinic.
Sawh explained that in the US and other First-World countries, the standard is one nurse to three paediatric patients, or one nurse to six adult patients. "That's fairly standard," he said.