THE Linden Hospital Complex (LHC) has recorded significant improvements over the last few months pertaining to drug availability and the provision of services, Chief Executive Officer Mohammed Riyasat has said.

On Wednesday, Riyasat told the Guyana Chronicle that a recent article published in the media was filled with baseless and malicious allegations and according to the facts, there is far more good than bad at the medical institution, which remains committed to serving the residents of Linden with efficiency and standards.

Riyasat said that for 2017, the hospital has so far completed 202 successful general surgeries. LHC, he said, has seven doctors, three of whom are specialists and four are general medical officers functioning at the surgical department. The consultants, he said, are on call every third week while the four junior doctors are on call every four nights. None of the specialists, he said, has gone on annual leave for the year as was reported.
In the X- RAY Department, the CEO said that for 2017, the six, 196 X- Rays were done on the hospital’s machines that are fully functioning. X-RAYS are done every day in three rooms simultaneously. The ECG machine that was out of paper for some time, is now functioning as it should and patients can now re-access this service. There is no shortage, according to the CEO, of blood pressure machines at the hospital and all departments are furnished with the requisite basic tools. There are currently 36 new BP apparatuses in stores, 12 that are functioning within the clinical area and five in the supervisor’s office. “There are blood pressure machines available in the Intensive Care Unit, Out Patients Department), Accident and Emergency, Male and Female Wards, Paediatric Wards, Operating Theatre and Maternity Ward,” Riyasat said.
As it relates to the claim of victimisation of staff members, the CEO said that the LHC does not have the authority to transfer any doctor to other regions, since they are assigned by the Ministry of Public Health through the Regional Health Service. The hospital has trained 64 Guyanese doctors who returned from Cuba. The LHC, he said, functions at a very high level of efficiency and standard and therefore there is the need for close monitoring, supervision and continuous training of the doctors.

Drugs shortage significantly alleviated
While the CEO admitted that some drugs are not available at the hospital, he said that the situation has improved significantly over the past months and the hospital is never negligent of its requisition of drugs from the Materials and Management Unit (MMU). For the drugs that are not available through the MMU, the hospital uses its emergency funds of $30 M appropriated by the Ministry of Health to purchase critical drugs. “The drug situation has improved, we still don’t have all the necessary and critical drugs that we need; we are getting more drugs that we use to get before, we are getting more items on the requisition,” Riyasat said. “The idea is to have the key drugs or the substitute in place, the case is now you can get three out of four drugs, we always make sure that we have quantities of critical drugs,” the CEO said.

He revealed that the laboratory’s chemical analyser is not functioning presently, therefore patients have to access these services at private institutions, but the situation should change soon. “Yesterday Dr. Shako (Director of Regional Health Services) told me, that they have already tendered and the contracts are already approved, so we are still waiting to have a new machine,” Riyasat revealed. “These things are out of authority, I just cannot go and buy a machine, we don’t operate like that, we are not allowed to.”
Relative to the allegation that drugs are being sold to private pharmacies, the medical practitioner related that there were several audits done on the pharmacy in 2017; both internal and external. audits were done on the pharmacy, while a physical count was done of drugs on the ward. In addition to this, a special audit was done by the Office of the Auditor General. The audits all showed that all drugs were accounted for. Dr. Riyasat said that while all is not ‘rosy,’ there have been significant improvements in services offered at the LHC.