Our hospitals need more attention

PREVENTION will always be better than cure, as the saying goes.
Time after time we see fellow citizens fall to preventable illness or medical procedures and process.
Fingers most times would then pointing to the hospitals ill-equipped state.
This week, we have the head of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Port Moresby General Hospital Dr Glen Mola calling on the government to build three district hospitals in NCD with fully functional maternity sections where normal births can be supervised and complicated cases referred to PMGH.
He says all that was needed was the same quality of building supervision given to the construction of sports stadium and other prestigious buildings in the capital city.
What happened to the plan set up a maternity ward at the Gerehu General Hospital is something for the authorities to update.
The hospital in Gerehu is rated level four and is NCD’s provincial hospital.
He said it should therefore be fully equipped.
About 30 per cent of the women giving birth there came all the way from Central and Gulf which meant those provinces badly needed to improve their health services delivery systems.
He said an operating theatre was built by the Japanese government in the late 1980s.
In 2015, the Rotary Club made extensions to the labour ward and the nursery.
Time and time we argue and debate that we have all the money in the world to make available world class hospitals, yet why can’t we have the best hospital care system?
When we do try to upgrade our facilities, we are faced with roadblocks such as uncompleted projects, budget overruns and the lot that derails the project completion.
All those are part and partial elements of delivering what is lacking in our major referral hospitals in the country, which are inundated with maladministration, and mismanagement by the respective hospital boards, lack of motivation, care, pride and under resource of health workers and
most of all a quality health care system.
The good news though is the government has set the target of completing the implementation of the provincial health authority in all provinces. It is through this organisational change, the delivery of primary healthcare in Papua New Guinea will improve by materialising right down to the community level.
At the same time, government should consider disbanding all these unnecessary red tape of management and align the executive head office (CEO) of the hospitals to one regulatory hospital board, which will be as a start, be overseen by the Health Department and the ministry.
Eventually, building up capacity and move it out to be an independent authority on all national referral hospitals.
Once that is achieved, and then this authority board can start looking at the appropriate road mapping to building capacity into our national referral hospitals to have the ability and capacity in delivering quality healthcare.
They will hand manage end to end and ensure their capacity and ability that we our medical doctors and nurses have the best and latest medical equipment that are covered with back to back technical support and warranty from the equipment suppliers.
From CT scans, ultrasound machines, MRI scans to digital X-ray systems and the lot.
That we have the best and well trained and regularly updated technically skilled biomedical engineers, managers and technicians to ensure all these medical equipment are always up and running for our doctors and nurses use to save and prevent loss of lives, through early detection and prevention of the root cause of illness or medical disorder.
Nothing is impossible.
It can be done.