Patients sleeping on benches at hospitals

After being injured on the job recently, Jane Brown* is upset that she was forced to spend the night sleeping on a bench at the Falmouth Public General Hospital in Trelawny last week.

She explained that she fell while at work on May 27 and was in severe pain after the incident. If her head injury was not enough, Brown said that she spent hours waiting to receive medical care.

“I was at the hospital from around nine the morning until after four in the evening because they said my case is not an emergency. When they eventually saw me, they said that I needed to stay overnight for monitoring and do a CT scan the Tuesday morning. Sleeping on the bench was rough. I had to be spinning the entire night,” she said.

Errol Greene, regional director for the Western Regional Health Authority, said that he is aware that there are bed shortages at the Falmouth Hospital. However, he said that this is an islandwide problem.

“All hospitals in Jamaica have an acute space shortage,” Greene said.

“It is unfortunate, but they (the patients) would have to stay on the bench or go home. We would rather have them there, where they can be monitored, even though the circumstances are not comfortable.”

Renovated

He added that the situation at Falmouth Hospital is even worse because some cases are being transferred there while the Cornwall Regional Hospital is being renovated.

Brown further explained that after she did the CT scan on Tuesday, she was told that she needed to stay one more day. However, she refused.

“After I did the CT scan, they told me that I should stay another night and I said: ‘No, I’m going home because I need to sleep on a bed.’ I got four days sick leave, and they said that if I vomit, I should come back. By the Thursday, I vomited blood. The headaches were serious. I was advised to write to Minister (Christopher) Tufton, but I know that nothing will come out of it because he must have known that beds are short in the hospitals on the island,” she said.

While acknowledging that the situation is bad, Greene said that hospitals are built to hold a certain number of beds. Therefore, even if more beds were available, he said there wouldn’t be any space to put them.

He added: “At Cornwall (Regional Hospital), about 15 per cent of the persons there are persons who do not need to take up a bed. They should be home, but they are social cases and their family members do not want to come for them.”

* Name changed