Basic medication absent at GPHC’s Eye Clinic

Medical staffers at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC)’s Eye Clinic are threatening to down tools if the necessary items required for them to do their daily jobs are not provided.
This was expressed by the hospital’s Ophthalmologist, Dr. George Norton who added that there is a belief that only when the media gets involved then officials at the health institution tends to fulfill their mandate towards patients and staffers at the facility.
The seemingly frustrated Norton posited that, on many occasions doctors and nurses turn up at their work stations to do the job they are being paid to do but the necessary items required for them to work are not available.
“We don’t have simple things like gauze (cotton strips) to dress wounds,” Dr. Norton stressed. He added that sometime last week, a baby was brought to the city hospital from Corentyne, Berbice and needed antibiotics but none was available.
“Imagine, this baby came all the way from Berbice and couldn’t get antibiotics. What are we doing?” the Ophthalmologist questioned.
Norton said that there is a major shortage of critical drugs at the facility such as pain killers.
“If you want to examine the eyes, you have to dilate the pupils but we don’t have the drug needed to dilate the pupil.”
He stressed that in May last, he wrote a letter to the hospital’s Administrator, informing him that by the end of June, there would be a need for some basic eye medication in the Eye Clinic. “I re-sent the letter sometime in June last and there was no response. June passed and we ran out of medication. We only got them sometime in this month and the main part of the order was missing.”
This newspaper tried unsuccessfully to contact the hospital’s Chief Executive Officer, Michael Khan for a comment but this proved futile.
This newspaper also tried to contact Director of Medical Services Dr Sheik Amir, who was Acting CEO of the hospital and this was also unsuccessful.
“A Chinese doctor went to New York and bought his own equipment to do his work. That is what we have to do now,” Norton said.
He explained that last Thursday, he along with a patient and his nurses were preparing to do an eye surgery when they were told that there were no surgical scrubbing brushes.
“The scrubbing brush is what you use to wash your hands before you begin operating on the eyes. The eyes are sensitive and once it gets an infection, you can get blind,” Norton said, adding that after he raised the issue with the authorities, a box of surgical scrubbing brushes appeared in the theatre but it was found that it had expired since August.
“We can’t play with someone’s eyes, and these items should be provided. We have to make do but what happens is, if you make do, you will have to continue to make do,” the eye doctor stressed.
Norton is of the opinion that those responsible at the hospital wait for the drugs to finish before they make an order