By Angelo Laurence, Freelance Writer
MANDEVILE, Manchester:
THE RECENTLY refurbished Mandeville Regional hospital is already suffering from over-crowding on its maternity ward where last week two patients were assigned to one bed in each of the ward's forty beds.
The refurbishing included the building, at a cost of more than $750 million, of a morgue and new wing designed to hold 250 beds.
However, the maternity ward was only allotted forty beds though the number of patients coming to that department had increased by more than fifty per cent over the intake recorded a year ago.
Operations manager of the institution, Lavern Palmer, said that the hospital had been grappling with the problem of over-crowding for a number of years, but the situation had worsened since the new wing of the hospital opened two years ago.
He said women travel from as far away as Westmoreland and Trelawny to have their babies at the hospital. Some claimed they want to have their children at the "hotel" as the hospital has been nicknamed by patients.
This, she said had compounded the problem. As a result doctors had to screen patients with a view to sending them home early, where it is safe to do so, in order to relieve the problem.
At present the maternity ward is delivering an average of three hundred babies per month, according to Mrs. Palmer, in spite of the severe shortage of medical personnel. She said currently staff is drawn from other departments as needed and there is no specified staff complement for the maternity ward. The shortage of personnel, she said, included nurses and midwives.
Mrs. Palmer dismissed suggestions that the recent recruitment of Jamaican nurses by the United States and England was directly the cause of the shortage and said that those countries had been recruiting Jamaican medical personnel over a sustained period of time dating back to the 1960s.
A patient who told The Gleaner she was from Falmouth, Trelawny said she came to the Mandeville Hospital because her friend who is from Montego Bay had her baby there and thought that the care was exceptional.
She said that her other two children were born at the Cornwall Regional Hospital in Montego Bay and she believed that the care she received at the Mandeville Hospital was far
better.
One nurse, however, complained that the present overcrowding was stretching the human and physical resources of the maternity ward to its limit.
The hospital management is now mapping out a strategy to deal with the problem and will be focusing on those persons who refuse to use institutions nearer to their homes, The Gleaner was told.
Mrs. Palmer would not disclose the intended measures to be implemented to combat the problem. She said she was encouraging expectant mothers to use those facilities near to their homes since the care and cost were basically the same as those at the Mandeville Regional Hospital.
The hospital's chief executive officer (CEO) Mrs. Shyrl Cameron told The Gleaner that the hospital was in the process of creating a new ward to give post-natal care.
This, she said, would effectively give relief to the problem of overcrowding as post-natal care is currently being given on the maternity ward. The new ward is expected to be operational within the next two weeks.
She also said the lack of adequate space (beds) to accommodate the number of mothers-to-be who turned up at the facility last week led to two patients being assigned to each of the wards forty beds.
The CEO said that overcrowding at the hospital's maternity ward had become the norm but warned that the situation was a stressful one for the doctors, nurses and other staff members as well as the patients.
