Poor customer service is Botswana's hallmark

| Friday April 13, 2007 00:00

The situation at our hospitals is heart wrenching. It's not at all unusual to find a nurse screaming at a patient, mistreating a patient or shouting from the top of her lungs to another nurse across the hall to have the CD4 count results of the patient in the consultation room delivered to them. Anyone who has been to a government hospital has a horror story to tell.

 

I remember some five years back we had a new nurse in my village. Apparently the nurse in question had been demoted and deported from the prestigious and notorious Princess Marina to this very remote village clinic of mine for mistreating a minister's relative. This nurse, let us call her nurse A, was extra mean! A lot of people preferred to go to neighbouring villages to seek treatment.

 

Nurse A couldn't be bothered if one brought a dying child to her, if she was having her break, then she was having her break. And she had many of those breaks! Nurse A made her own rules and anyone who wanted treatment had to obey those rules. Nurse A couldn't be bothered about a lot of things, like publicizing a patient's HIV status or getting reported to relevant authorities. No one missed her when she finally left!

The very unfortunate thing about my little narration is that it's not an example of my imaginative mind.

 

In the minds of Batswana, nurse equals devil with a huge fork. The thought of going to a hospital still sends shivers down my spine. I always hope for a nurse whose application letter to work in the UK has not been turned down. Our nurses are so good at belittling and thoroughly humiliating patients. Our nurses don't know anything about botho or compassion. It is common place to find a very young nurse, fresh from IHS, scolding a sick elderly person as if their 'nurseliness' depended on it! Our nurses are sulky, nasty and so inhumane! Really, if Florence Nightingale was still alive, she wouldn't recognize this profession. And to think about it, I wonder how many of our nurses know the story of Nightingale and how it relates to them.

 

Minister Tlou talked of shortage of staff, true and understandable in some cases. But is that enough excuse for giving Batswana bad service? Going back to the story of nurse A who works in a remote village, with two assistants and whose majority of patients are infants needing their injections, what is the excuse? Make no mistake, I do not trivialize the fact that nurses are underpaid and overworked.

 

It's a sad and unfortunate thing. But like I asked earlier, is that enough reason to violate patients' rights, humiliate them and make them really sorry they ever went to a hospital? I see this as a matter of attitude on the nurses' side. Just like all government-staff-from-hell, it's the same thing: showing the customer who's the boss.

 

Nurses can demonstrate to maximum satisfaction that patients are at their mercy. It is their way or the highway. Batswana don't prefer private doctors because they have money to splash around, they go there because of the magic word: service. Nobody wants their HIV status publicized for all to hear. Nobody wants their illness to be trivialized. Nobody wants to be treated like a highly contagious virus, with disdain and disrespect.

 

The public looks at our hospitals with mistrust and lots of hatred. And who can blame them? The stories of people who have lost their lives while waiting for the likes of nurse A are not just stories. Women have miscarried and bled to near death on benches while nurses passed by, unfazed. So I'm saying, Minister Tlou, this is not about being understaffed. This is a reflection of the attitudes, dedication and moral values of your nurses. What is the use of having state of the art equipment and personnel if we don't get to see and feel its value? Bad service is just that - bad.

T.L. Matsapa

University of Botswana

Gaborone