Lone pathologist challenges govt to hire more
Pini Bothoko | Tuesday May 13, 2014 10:46
Concerned Madan, who is based at Nyangabgwe Referral Hospital (NRH), raised her worry during the National Health Quality Standards Dissemination campaign held at Adansonia Hotel last Friday.
The Ministry of Health, with the aim of driving the provision of quality health care services and promoting continuous quality improvement in the health sector, has completed the development of the five sets of “National Health Quality Standards”.
The standards which are for hospitals, clinics, mortuary, environmental health services and emergency medical services (EMS), were launched January this year.
Madan revealed how overwhelmed she was with work, saying the situation was worsened by the fact that people who help her were not trained for the job, thus putting her career at stake.
She said there were no technicians to assist her and that she only gets help when police officers perform post mortems at the hospital because they have a qualified pathologist and technicians.
She went on to complain about NRH’s infrastructure, arguing that it is not in good condition. She said that there is a serious shortage of manpower and resources.
She said at times she receives bodies unlabelled and will be forced to send them back to be labelled. The people who do that job, she said, were industrial workers who would end up not labelling the corpses due to lack of knowledge.
Madan said that the ventilation at NRH mortuary was not of good standard and pleaded with government to improve the air conditioning as she said it was not good for workers.
She said that there was no fuming structure in the mortuary, dreading the fact that in the event of performing an autopsy, some corpses could have airborne infections, which could possibly infect mortuary attendants.
She said autopsy for people suffering from deadly diseases like Multi-Drug Resistant (MDR) tuberculosis could be harmful and needs extra caution hence engagement of unskilled personnel to carry such a job could be dangerous to them.
“There are no utensils to use at the mortuary. There are only two trolleys that I discovered have been around since 1988. There are no lights to sterilise utensils after use and there are only two coffins for adults and two more for children,” she said.
Madan said that there were only 21 refrigerators at the mortuary, adding that they were not enough and that the situation ends up forcing the hospital to outsource from private mortuaries.
She said NRH safety infrastructure is of Level 2 but they carry out Level 3 autopsy and she pleaded with the health ministry to immediately attend to the issues, as hopefully, it will help address the use of standards.
During questions and comments, the participants backed the pathologist in calling on government to speed up attending to the issue of shortage of pathologists and mortuary attendants.
In response, the Director of Health Services Dr Khumo Seipone said the ministry has established that it has so many challenges and decided to come up with quality standards that will be used to address them.
“We will be working with all facilities to improve the service in all departments and hope its use will bear fruit in the near future,” he said.
Dr Seipone could not be drawn into talking about the issue of shortage of pathologists or infrastructural deficiencies that Madan spoke about.