Health service under pressure

THE ALREADY strained Corporate Area health services were put under even more pressure over the weekend and yesterday as gunfire continued in sections of the city.

Public and private hospitals reported that many administrative and nursing staff did not turn up for work because of fear.

Several hospitals were forced to postpone scheduled surgeries and adjust services to accommodate patients coming in, some of whom were usually bound for the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH), which is accepting only dire emergency cases.

Some health facilities, among them Nuttall Memorial, St. Joseph, Andrews Memorial, National Chest and Bustamante hospitals, organised transportation to take mid-afternoon to night shift employees to work.

The Junior Doctors Association (JDA) yesterday indicated that hospitals may be stressed further by the absence of doctors. "We are confident that should the violence continues, the situation will get worse as more and more of us will stay home," the association which represents the island's junior doctors says.

Reiterating KPH's call that persons stay away from the hospital, the JDA said, "We cannot continue to encourage our members to risk their lives unnecessarily in this time of senseless violence."

Karl Davis, Chief Executive Officer at the University Hospital of the West Indies, said that the hospital had been hard hit. "Our medical and surgical wards are now full and we have to start admitting patients to specialist wards" which were usually not used for that purpose, he explained.

Mr. Davis said that the number of patients seen in the hospital's Accident and Emergency Department had also tripled on Saturday and doubled on Sunday although he was unsure whether persons injured in the West Kingston flare-up were among those admitted.

The Junior Doctors Association is concerned that resources will soon be depleted. "Already we can hardly cope with treating patients with genuine illnesses because of scarce resources. The treatment of victims of violence require the utilisation of much of these scarce resources and at the current rate of consumption these will soon be gone," said the association's statement.

KPH's CEO, Errol Beckford, agreed, stating that there was already a critical need for blood at the hospital although service had improved because the electricity, cut off when violence damaged a transmitter nearby, had been restored.

The National Blood Transfusion Service also reported that it was in need of various types of blood, including O, A and B and asked that persons make donations at blood collection centres, located in major hospitals islandwide.

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