The original article can be found in: The Royal Gazette By Jonathan Bell
A woman left waiting for weeks to obtain medicine for her son’s schizophrenia has had her prescription filled — with an apology from the Bermuda Hospitals Board.
The single mother, who is caregiver for her 26-year-old son, said she resorted to contacting the media only because she’d been unable to get any answers after lodging her concerns with BHB’s quality improvement department.
She requested not to be named, in order to protect her son’s privacy.
“They called me today to say it’s ready for me to collect,” the woman said, of her son’s three-month supply of medication required during a stay with family in the US.
Although thankful for the medication, which suppresses the depression and psychotic symptoms caused by schizophrenia, the woman said: “Before it came out in the paper, nobody bothered with me. Now they’re calling me. I assume they know I was trying to get in touch with them before. I just wish I hadn’t had to go through so much stress.”
The story was reported in yesterday’s edition of The Royal Gazette.
“I guess if the paper didn’t say anything then nothing would have been done,” she said.
“I already said to them that I was going to the paper if they wouldn’t tell me anything, and their response was that that’s not the way to go. But you can’t do this to people who need their medication.”
She said her son maintains his own daily regimen of the drugs that keep his worst symptoms at bay.
“Now I’ve got to figure out how to send it abroad,” she said.
For the present, her son has a month’s supply of medication.
A spokeswoman for BHB said the organisation “deeply regrets it took several weeks to respond to a request from a service user for a three-month supply of medications needed during his overseas travels”.
She added: “There is a process for accommodating requests during a leave of absence from Bermuda and we apologise to the service user and his mother in this case that our process took longer than it should have taken. We are pleased to report the prescriptions have now been filled and we have contacted the service user’s mother to arrange for the medication to be made available to her son.
“We are reviewing how we handle these kinds of requests in order to streamline the process and provide service users with a more timely response going forward.”
