Latest update April 23rd, 2024 12:59 AM
Sep 09, 2012 News
Criticisms will not halt plans to improve the operation of the West Demerara Regional Hospital, according to Minister of Health, Dr Bheri Ramsaran.
The Minister is convinced that the hospital is poised for improvement in the face of recent heavy condemnations, particularly from the media.
“I think the hospital is doing better but it still faces some criticism…I say it is doing better because the theatre services are working better and the wards are being redone; we are even taking patients from the Georgetown Public Hospital there.”
This move, the Minister said, is characterised by some patients on the public hospital’s waiting list being transferred the West Demerara Hospital. This is especially true for patients suffering from fibroids and hernias, Minister Ramsaran said.
He said, too, that many of the fistulae that are done to facilitate dialysis are also done at the West Demerara Hospital and not at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) as many believe.
This, he disclosed, is strategically done to take pressure off the latter.
A recent decision to twin the two hospitals has come as part of Government’s plans to utilise its resources more rationally, Minister Ramsaran said, adding that “we are looking to see how they can synergise…we are even constantly looking at decanting patients who come from Region Three after surgery and such things to better utilise the hospital’s capacity.”
As part of its continued effort to raise the standard of the hospital, the Minister disclosed that the Ministry of Health has been helping with renovation works adding that the medical facility has for the past four years been receiving massive investments and massive attention from Government.
This, he said, has allowed for the administration to remove age-old items that could now be disposed. However, the Minister noted that items cannot simply be discarded from the hospital since the administration could fall foul of the auditors if these items are not properly written off.
This undertaking by the hospital, Dr Ramsaran said, has attracted much unwanted attention. For instance, he noted that a lot of the discarded items were published in the media as unserviceable items but these were in fact items that have not been working for as long as 20 years.
“They cannot be thrown out because the auditors have to first write them off…The Ministry had advised the hospital to move them from prime locations in the facility and put them in other places and that is what the regional administration and the hospital administration were in the process of doing when it was presented as unwanted and unserviceable items in the media as if the hospital had not been operating properly.”
Minister Ramsaran said that his Ministry has also been directing much attention to the Lethem Hospital where an investigation has commenced into the recent destruction of an ambulance.
Reports are that the ambulance, the property of the Guyana Government, was destroyed by fire.
The incident, according to the Minister, occurred during the latter part of August and the Ministry has since launched a probe to determine who or what was responsible for the unfortunate incident. However, he noted that within a week of the occurrence the Ministry of Health was able to replace an ambulance in the Region Nine area which is inhabited by mostly indigenous residents.
“On the first day of September which marked the beginning of (Amerindian) Heritage Month the Ministry was able to hand over a virtually new ambulance to the Lethem
Hospital…”
“That ambulance was sorely needed and it was definitely a threat to the health services in Lethem and the wider Region Nine and we have solved that problem within days…
We were able to ready the ambulance and take it up very quickly to Lethem…” said the Minister as he amplified the importance of equitable delivery of health services.
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