Avert catastrophe: Improve conditions of service for health staff
| Wednesday February 11, 2015 11:51
Chief among their complaints has been the fact that they work extraordinarily long hours, looking after so many patients. Sometimes they do not even have a break, especially when the queues are long. This places patient care in danger as overworked doctors and nurses are likely to miss vital signs. Take a 24-hour clinic such as Gaborone’s Julia Molefhe.
The facility is usually filled to capacity as late as 8pm, not because the doctors and nurses are idling, but because there are too many patients. A doctor who starts work at 8pm, and finds nearly 200 patients – 10 times more than the recommended number he or she is supposed to see in a day - cannot hope to get a break before 8am.
Otherwise, the doctor would fail to treat the many patients who wait in queue. Because there are so many patients, the doctors also have to spend far less time than the recommended best practice of 15 minutes to check patients. Many of the patients and their families may blame the doctors and the nurses for failing them. We can understand that. Many of them simply do not know. Even the Minister of Health and the Permanent Secretary does not know that the health staff are fatigued.
The patients simply want to be treated and their families want to see their loved ones out of misery. This is obviously not fair on the nurses and doctors who cannot tell patients that they are too tired and are likely to miss signs that affect patients’ chances of survival.
Perhaps the greatest mockery of health care is in government’s major hospitals in Nyangabgwe and Princess Marina.
We have observed that Marina, the country’s main referral hospital is so under-staffed with a serious deficit in bed capacity that there are times when there is only one intern doctor at its Accident and Emergency wing. The doctor will be working with one or two nurses, who will be striving to take vital signs from patients, some of whom lie on the floor because there are not enough beds.
As government departments are wont to do, the hospital may deny these realities exist. But while busy issuing denials and failing to feed the minister proper information about what actually prevails on the ground, patients are dying. These are patients who should not be dying.
Let us face it. Even the kindest of doctors will find it a big challenge when he or she has to stand on his feet for 12 or more hours, trying to be focused, to give his or her patients the best attention and still be nice to everyone, including surly family members.
We urge the government to speedily find a solution to many problems that have led to the acute shortage of doctors in Botswana. This could avert catastrophe, especially in this era of highly contagious and deadly diseases such as Ebola.
Today’s thought
“There is no such thing as an infallible doctor.”
– Edward E. Rosenbaum