KPH GLORY!
The Kingston Public Hospital along North Street, West Kingston
THIS is not fake news.
For the first time in recent history, officials and employees of Kingston Public Hospital (KPH) have reason to pop a bottle of champagne and reach for the sky in celebration of a feat they describe as more than welcome.
For the month of October 2017, the 475-bed hospital, the largest of its kind in the English-speaking Caribbean, achieved something that hitherto was thought to be nigh impossible: None of the 104 injured people who arrived at the facility with gunshot wounds died while undergoing treatment. Hospital officials are hailing it as an indication that treatment standards and procedures are on the improve.
The KPH, located in the heart of the volatile West Kingston community, developed a reputation over the years as a brutish hospital that, in some cases, does not go deep enough in ensuring that lives are saved.
Its treatment of the largely poorer segment of the population, who are drawn primarily from the inner-city communities in close proximity, the lower socio-economic stratum of the society, or as the referral institution for several hospitals across Jamaica, has been criticised by many of those who have sojourned there while suffering from various ailments.
One of the major complaints by patients over the years has been the long waiting time that they have had to endure, as well as the attitude of medical staff, mainly some nurses, who they have described as rude, condescending and uncaring to them.
Chief Executive Officer of the KPH, Errol Greene, confirmed to the Jamaica Observer in an interview that while some of the general challenges were being treated with the appropriate medicine, the hospital has made genuine progress in the quest to improve life for those who arrive there.
“We look good for the month of October,” stated Greene, a former town clerk in the then Kingston & St Andrew Corporation, who also served the then St Thomas Parish Council in a similar role under a different nomenclature.
“It’s the first from we started keeping statistics years ago that we did not have a death from gunshot wounds in ICU (Intensive Care Unit) or A&E (Accident and Emergency).” Greene told the Sunday Observer, too, that the number of gunshot wounds handled by the hospital had been on a gradual decline over the past four months.
“In August, the number of gunshot wounds coming to A&E was 125. By September it fell to 112; October, 104; and November, 60. So there has been a 50 per cent cut between August and November,” Greene revealed, quoting from the latest report that went before the hospital’s Management Committee meeting last week.
The CEO maintained that complaints were still being received from patients and their relatives, who believe that they were not treated professionally when they visit the hospital. He insisted that all were dealt with adequately.
“We always get complaints about staff not treating patients right, and we respond to every single one of those. One day, about two or three weeks ago, a complaint reached as high as the minister (of health). We invited the lady in, we had a discussion with her, she explained to us what her issues were, and we offered her a tour of the hospital. When we were halfway through, she wanted to volunteer to help the hospital. She realised that we were doing our best. People are gonna be people, and you are going to have the deviants, but we are trying,” Greene said.
The KPH, in the rating of Jamaican medical institutions, ranks number one, ahead of the University Hospital of the West Indies at Mona, St Andrew; and Cornwall Regional Hospital in the heart of Montego Bay, capital of the western parish of St James.
Among the services offered by the 241-year-old KPH that came into existence on December 14, 1776, are general surgery; ear, nose and throat surgery; cardiology; laboratory; diagnostic imaging; ophthalmology; anaesthesia; intensive care pain management; physiotherapy; physical rehabilitative services; dietary services; radiotherapy; gastroenterology; haematology; dialysis; endocrinology; rheumatology and psychiatry.
Last February, during the observance of the hospital’s 240th year of existence, Senior Medical Officer Dr Natalie Whylie told the Jamaica Information Service that the dedication of the staff was responsible for the institution’s long life.
“The staff is committed to delivering quality health care which is in line with our quality definition statement. This states that at KPH, quality is the delivery of timely, efficient, courteous, and cost-effective service which is accessible to all … even with the constraints, even with the overcrowding, even with the infrastructural challenges, the staff is committed to delivering quality service,” she said.
Each day KPH treats an average 250 people at its Accident & Emergency unit, and sees more than 2,000 at its Outpatients Department. The hospital also performs close to 100,000 surgical procedures annually, according to its internal data.
It has had several medical firsts, but one that stands out is a surgical procedure done several years ago by highly respected orthopaedic surgeon Dr Warren Blake who reattached a man’s severed hand, the first time that such an operation had been done in Jamaica.
Having returned in 1986 from further studies at Derby Royal Infirmary, a hand surgery unit in England, Blake started working at KPH shortly afterwards. Early in 1987 the injured man turned up at the hospital without his hand — chopped off by another man during a dispute in the New Lincoln Road area of Jones Town where Blake was born and raised. The hand had been thrown into a garbage bin.
The victim had rushed to the hospital, writhing in pain, and Blake sent for the hand, which was quickly retrieved from the receptacle then, in a 12-hour operation, completed a successful replantation of the hand.
Blake is the president of the Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association.
Some of the more developed hospitals in the Caribbean have been engaging in varying levels of health tourism, whereby sick people from other countries enter their wards to have their medical problems addressed.
While KPH sees patients from outside Jamaica’s shores, Greene does not think that the most equipped and staffed institution in Jamaica can do likewise for now.
“People from overseas come here now. They pay their way, as we cannot afford to extend the no-user-fee policy to them. We don’t turn back anybody, but we can’t look at that now (health tourism thrust) because the demand to us at home is overwhelming. We have to satisfy our demands first before we can do that,” Greene stated.
One of the most sought-after hospitals in the region by foreigners is Hermanos Amerijeiras (also pronounced Almahera) Hospital in Central Havana — a 22-floor facility that is celebrating 35 years of offering services to the people of Cuba and the wider world.
The structure was to be the site of Cuba’s National (Central) Bank when construction began in 1959, but the country’s new leader, Fidel Castro Ruz, decided to turn it into a hospital, which was opened 23 years after the Revolution.
According to the Cuban Ministry of Information, Hermanos Amerijeiras was “created by the Revolution to offer the people service in a best-in-class, world-class environment,” although critics of the one-party Socialist State have said that only the members of the Cuban elite are taken there for treatment, an allegation that has been vehemently denied by officials of the Government of the Spanish-speaking north Caribbean island of 11.48 million people.
For Greene, the surgery to remove some of the stigma from one of the ‘old ladies’ of North Street is well under way.
“My personal goal is to improve customer service, reduce waiting time, and to make the facilities cleaner. We have been getting a lot of commendations about the cleanliness of the place,” he said of one of the Corporate Area’s most visited sites.