Every time I pass by the Couva “Children’s” Hospital or whatever name it’s now called, I shudder. Shudder at the political commess that made Mrs Persad-Bissesar fulfill her campaign promise to build a hospital for children.
Shudder with anger at the medical professionals, whether in the private sector or in the Ministry of Health, who supported that decision. Shudder with shame that the money wasted is not available to the children who need it, children with special needs, children with cancer, children who need bone marrow transplants, children who need MRI’s, the list is endless.
Wasted, wasted money all because of a political promise and so that political backers could make more money.
My team opened the real Children’s Hospital, the Wendy Fitzwilliams Hospital at the EWMSC, at 1 pm on May 15, 1990.
It was a Tuesday and together with the other paediatric consultants from POSGH, I had moved my outpatient clinic to EWMSC. Somewhere in the mess that is the medical records department at EWMSC, there is a medical chart with a big PATIENT #1 written on the jacket.
Seven months later we accepted the first in-patient on January 2, 1991, a child from Diego Martin, with leukemia, that the incomparable Dr Waveney Charles had referred to us from POSGH. I resigned four years later, a bit frustrated.
I went back there last week. My paediatric colleagues and their secretary greeted me in their nicely-decorated UWI Child Health Unit. They looked harassed and tired but they were working at 2 pm and not expecting to leave for some hours. A typical day.
Pictures of local children and former colleagues covered the walls together with the occasional painting. Care had been taken to make the place child-friendly.
The same thing had been done with the Children’s Outpatient Area, the walls painted with tropical scenes by students from the International School of Port of Spain. Really! Do we always need foreigners, military or otherwise, to paint our hospitals?
The paintings compensated somewhat for the claustrophobic feeling that the low ceiling gave to the outpatient area. I could reach the ceiling by putting my hand up and stretching. For children you see!
This was similar to the outmoded design of the children’s wards built by the French in the ’80s, outmoded then, outmoded now, with an outer corridor where parents were supposed to look through a window at their hospitalised child! Waste of space. Increases patient and parent stress.
One wonders if parents and paediaticians were consulted then about the hospital’s design.
That was the good part. The rest of my visit was quite shocking.
It looks as if there’s been no maintenance since I left 24 years ago. Small guard houses made of plywood dot the compound, with scruffy looking guards loitering around, spoiling the look of the still impressive buildings. Steps are crumbling. Corridor tiles are loose and missing. The walls haven’t been painted or even cleaned for years.
My wife pointed out to me the accumulated dirt in the creases formed between the floor and the walls.
The In-patient Building of the Children’s Hospital has four floors.
All the children’s beds (60) and equipment on the top floor have been removed, no one knows where, and the ward is now occupied by adults. The two middle wards are for children. The bottom floor has been given over to geriatrics.
The smell of urine from the old guys is overwhelming and welcomes you as you approach from the parking lot. It penetrates into the Outpatient Clinic some 50 yards away.
I had never been to a hospital that smells of pee before, not even in the ancient buildings that used to pass for hospitals in the interior of Venezuela.
Perhaps the worst is the hospital garbage collection system. It’s just off to the side of the children’s wards, mere yards away. What a view, what a smell, for sick children, their parents and doctors and nurses.
That’s sickening, unhygienic, filthy and disrespectful. Not to worry. We building two more hospitals.