|
Fixing Mayo Hospital —Syed
Mansoor Hussain
 We owe it to them, to
the patients that come to Mayo Hospital and to our medical heritage
to fix and not destroy Mayo Hospital
Over the last year, not a single bathroom available to patients,
attendants or junior staff has been fixed or renovated on the
surgical floor in the main building of Mayo Hospital. Multiple
visits by senior bureaucrats, politicians, governmental advisors of
all stripes and other VIPs has produced no change in what are
usually referred to as ‘quality of life’ issues and facilities.
Grand plans to remake Mayo Hospital are being considered. It is
perhaps important to mention here that Mayo Hospital is more a city
than just a hospital. It is spread over almost a square mile and has
dozens of departments housing many different specialties, and
thousands of in-patient beds and out-patient departments that are
visited by thousands of patients every day. Its different
laboratories cater to a similarly large number of patients.
The folly of any ‘grand’ plan to make this hospital better is well
demonstrated by the monstrosity called the Surgical Tower, an
incomplete behemoth that literally towers over the old building. It
is too expensive to complete and much too expensive to tear down;
its original purpose lost in the fog of time.
My fervent plea to the powers that be is: please decide the future
of the Surgical Tower, and then either complete it or tear it down
before any major change is made to the old building. The immediate
need, however, has to be the improvement of the existing facilities
in the historic buildings as well as the rest of the hospital.
Clearly, destroying or significantly altering any of the historic
building should be avoided. Crumbling walls, roofs in disrepair,
water and sewage pipes that have leaked for so long that the water
supply and the sewage are now indistinguishable, all merit immediate
attention. Further neglect is most likely to make them unsalvageable
in a decade or so.
Whatever needs to be done, the present culture of what seems like
wilful neglect must first be brought to an end. Those charged with
maintaining the existing facilities are clearly incapable or else
unwilling to do so. The present state of affairs is dismal.
A couple of examples might illustrate my point. First, one of the
smaller surgical departments located in the main building raised
almost two and a half million rupees to upgrade its ward and build
bathrooms for patients as well as the staff. Eight bathrooms
including two showers with hot water were built. The hospital
administration promised an added sum of less than a million rupees
to complete the renovations.
However with a new government came a new administration and the
hospital never paid up its share. The bathrooms were at least
completed and functional. And being the only ‘clean’ bathrooms
available for patients and staff on the entire surgical floor they
were used by not just the patients and staff in the department for
whom they were built but by almost everybody else, thus straining
the facilities to a breaking point.
When things broke down as expected, the hospital maintenance staff
refused to fix them since they had not been responsible for building
them! The real reason was of course that they had not received their
‘pound of flesh’ during the original construction. Now they keep
turning off the water supply on some pretext or the other having
given up on the flesh part but still hoping for a few drops of
blood.
Another example of the inadequacy of maintenance is the problem of
air-conditioners. Mayo Hospital probably has hundreds of
air-conditioners and evidently only two people to service or fix
them. When summer started, obviously the first air-conditioners
fixed were in the administrative buildings followed by areas visited
most often by VIPs. Given the capacity to service a few air
conditioners in a day, by the time patient care areas get their
turn, summer will be long gone.
I could go on and on till I beat the bush into a dead horse but why.
The point is simply that those responsible for maintaining and
improving existing facilities neither have the interest nor the
financial incentive to do so. However, the very idea of a mega
billion-rupee project sends a frisson of excitement up their
proverbial spines and everybody in the ‘food chain’ starts drooling
at the very thought of a ride on such a rich gravy train.
It would seem that proper maintenance and upgrade of the historic
building would not only make financial sense but would also preserve
our heritage. But the problem here is a mixture of the gravy problem
mentioned above and bureaucratic inertia. To get anything approved
and built by the authorities concerned takes many years since it
requires going through that ultimate bureaucratic nightmare: ‘the
proper channel’.
By the time anything important and reasonably expensive is approved,
the bureaucrats that approved it as well as the head of the
department that asked for the improvement are long gone. As a
result, most things that happen officially only happen when mega
projects are involved or else when a roof collapses or some other
catastrophe occurs. Most of the less costly improvements are however
done through private funding and often without official approval,
creating a host of ‘encroachments’.
I realise that the present government has a thing about
encroachment, as it should. But most of the encroachments built
within Mayo Hospital serve some important purpose and benefit
patients or the staff. And they are there because ‘proper channels’
like the drains of the above mentioned bathrooms seem to be blocked
most of the time.
But the hospital still functions, thousands of patients get taken
care of and hundreds of operations and procedures are performed
daily. This is a testament to the will of mostly the young
physicians and young nurses that do most of the work. We owe it to
them, to the patients that come to Mayo Hospital and to our medical
heritage to fix and not destroy Mayo Hospital.
Syed Mansoor Hussain has practised and taught medicine in the US.
He can be reached at smhmbbs70@yahoo.com
Daily Times:May 25, 2009
|
