THE management of the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation is responding to the statements made in the Freddie Kissoon’s Column published in yesterday’s edition of the Kaieteur newspaper and captioned, ‘Is the Georgetown Hospital a failure?’ In response to this article, management wishes to make the following statements.
The hospital has never boasted of perfection, but all will admit that the system is functional and comparable to many of its Caricom sister countries and internationally. The Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation is the country’s ONLY National Referral and Teaching hospital and the only public hospital in the city of Georgetown. It therefore stands to reason that many people will flock the hospital for both emergency and non urgent health matters, thus resulting in a predominantly crowded Emergency Room and clinics. This is despite the fact there are numerous health centres/clinics in and around the city, in addition to the Medical Outpatient Department, which is housed in the hospital’s compound.
Consequently, it is not feasible or practical to see patients as they present themselves at the A&E or on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. This is a point that the hospital has stressed over the years. Resultantly, patients will have to wait, some obviously longer than others, dependent on the severity/seriousness of their illnesses.
The triage system which is in operation at the A&E determines the order in which the patient is seen. It is noteworthy that the average waiting time at the A&E at GPHC is under one (1) hour (there are stats available to substantiate this fact) and these include patients with life threatening illnesses, who are seen within 5 mins of their arrival, to those patients who wait for six (6) hours or more for minor, non-urgent illnesses, when other emergency cases come in during the said period.
With reference to those non-responsive patients, from experience it has been revealed that those are the patients who would have left the department for whatever reason after they would have been triaged or registered; these patients are usually called on multiple occasions.
The items about which the author wrote are all prescription items and are therefore not stored at any location but at the Pharmacy, where by definition, all prescriptions are dispensed. The average waiting time at the Pharmacy generally varies because the process includes counting, packing and labelling envelopes and counselling patients before the medication is actually given to them. However, the hospital is currently in the process of constructing a Satellite Pharmacy at the Medical Outpatient Department, which will cater to those patients and hence reduce the number of patients who are served at the main Pharmacy.
Thus far for the year 2011, the hospital has admitted 13,626 patients, 34,072 patients have been seen at the A&E and there have been a total of 2067 referrals from the regional and private hospitals combined, as at the end of May. Additionally, there have been a total of 92,602 visits to the clinics including: the Medical, Surgical, Paediatric, Ear, Nose and Throat, Eye, Skin, Psychiatric, inter alia. Added to those numbers, there have been close to ½ of a million Laboratory tests performed, 32,318 X-Rays done and 315,524 prescriptions dispensed.
These stats speak to the volume of work diligently undertaken by the staff of the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation. It is by no means management’s intention to complain, but to simply show that these tasks are performed manually and as such, patients must exercise patience.
With the foregoing facts stated, management too asks the general public, is GPHC a failure? We categorically state not!