A Hospital or a Death Waiting Camp? Problems at the Central Regions referral hospital Kamuzu Central, have reached a crisis stage, with medical staff revealing that over 40 people die in a week due to curable ailments amid scarcity of the most basic hospital requirements...The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) which accommodates 3 patients at one go, struggles with over six patients wanting to share the equipment, such that medics say we have to sacrifice some patients for lack of alternatives.... while one doctor described how pathetic the situation is in the ICU, a nurse recounted about 14 deaths per day as her worst experience ever... Head of Surgery Dr Carlos Varela said he has hopelessly witnessed emergency patients dying because the hospital cannot operate on them as we do not even have materials to close the wound...we are losing a lot of lives and we cant help them, not because we dont want to help them but we dont have the materials. sometimes we keep the patients in the hope that we will find the materials, but they just get worse and they die... four years ago we would get between K80 and K100 million per month, but now the figure has been trimmed to K26million. This basically caters for bills, food and thats it, said Valera. (Source: The Nation newspaper of Friday, 1st Nov. 2013) Some Observations and a Question: 1. 40 deaths per week is 160 per month and 1,920 per year. These are just deaths from curable ailments. 2. A referral hospital in the capital city serving a big region with over 5million people has an ICU that can accommodate only 3 patients 3. A budget cut has left the hospital with only 25% of what it used to operate on four years ago. 4. This hospital could easily qualify as a death waiting camp. I can personally relate to this because my own father and uncle spent their last days in this death waiting camp. Although we could afford to run around to buy whatever materials we were asked by the hospital, such delays eventually costs their lives. 5. While there is ALWAYS money available for the president to move with her large cabinet to elevate a chief, distribute a cow and a blanket, a major referral hospital has no materials even just to close a wound! My only question is: Are we so hopeless as citizens that we cant do anything to get government see the need to increase funding to this hospital to help save some 1,920 plus lives that die every year in this hospital from curable ailments?
Posted on: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 07:51:09 +0000