The original article can be found in: The Barbados Advocate By Ryan Gilkes
Barbadians need to be more informed about what constitutes acute care.
In fact, it has been suggested that educating the public about this facet of health care could assist in alleviating some of the challenges currently faced by the island’s primary healthcare facility, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, in terms of wait times.
The suggestion came during a Public Forum hosted by the Barbados Nurses Association, on the topic ‘Nursing – a Multifaceted Profession: Are Nurses Catering to your needs?’ at the Hugh Springer Auditorium, Solidarity House.
Panelist, Nurse Margarette Wilson noted that in many instances persons seemed unaware about what constituted an emergency, with some of them visiting the Accident and Emergency Department for a simple check.
“We need to recognise what an emergency is. And the next thing we need to recognise is that because it is an emergency, if you come with a headache and we categorise you and we place you waiting to be seen by a doctor, anytime an ambulance comes with an emergency, your wait time is longer.
“We have polyclinics all around Barbados and you can walk into the polyclinic with an ID card and get service. But you prefer to come and sit in the A&E for two days sometimes, waiting that long. You can wait as long as that to get your care. I’ve been in the A&E and you have an emergency, and everyone that is there is called into the STAT room to deal with that patient who is in a life or death situation,” she said.
Wilson told the audience that persons waiting to be seen would be aware of the situation, yet still complain that they had to wait inordinately long times to be seen and treated.
Additionally, she revealed that high trauma incidents like stabbings and shootings were biting into acute care times.
“We have got now in this day and age, with the number of stab wounds, a number of gunshots; all these kinds of injuries coming that would take the morning. If you don’t be careful, nobody is going to be seen in A&E soon from now, because when a man comes to you and you look and see that he has the knife into his chest… The moment you pull that out, it is everything go; all services on alert. So therefore when you get a case like that, everybody else in the waiting room will have to do just that…wait,” she explained.
