This is my prayer: Make hospitals visitor friendly

Weekender

By STEVEN WINDUO
I HAVE been visiting the maternity ward at the Port Moresby General Hospital for more than a month and each time I find myself sitting outside the ward or around the car park at Susu Mamas clinic area.
My daughter’s baby was born prematurely and had to be put under observation at the nursery for a month or so. With my daughter in the hospital, our family had to make regular visits a week to see how she was.
However, we were restricted from visiting her in the maternity ward. Most of the visitors, including my family, had to sit anywhere outside the ward to talk to our relatives – when they are allowed to come outside.
The ground at the Port Moresby General Hospital maternity ward is the least sanitized place for visitors and mothers who are nursing newborns to meet, with winds, dust, and stray dogs everywhere.
I wish there was a place to pray at the maternity ward because my daughter’s baby was in the nursery and it was nerve wrecking for her.
How can Port Moresby General Hospital ignore building a space for visitors? Many of us who have been to the maternity ward to visit our relatives have been disappointed with the lack of a car park, benches to sit on, a building or room to wait in or meet.
We wanted to pray for my daughter and her baby but there was no prayer space or room, so we sat under the mango trees in the car park and prayed.
I think modern hospitals must have a prayer facility as part of its healing space. Prayers play a healing role in the practice of modern-day medicine. Hospital prayer rooms are for quiet meditations and spiritual reflections. They are also places to pray for divine intervention.
Hospitals are places for healing and recovery. It is important to have prayer facilities made available in the hospital spaces for people who choose to pray for healing and speedy recovery.
Prayer rooms can do mental wonders to people’s recovery in hospitals.
British theologian Georgiana Heskins and health library expert Imrana Ghumra argued that a prayer room in a hospital serves as a sacred space that can promote healing and recovery.
“Most established hospitals in the UK have a Christian chapel, but over the last decade there has been growing demand for a wider provision in order to meet the needs of people from different religious and cultural backgrounds in a plural society,” they said in an article they published in 2005.
The development of a prayer room has been long overdue. Even Britain’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, at Woolwich, struggled with the idea before a proper prayer room was built.
It is becoming a trend for hospitals to have prayer rooms.
Even airports and education institutions have them now. Such a space provides the foundation for healing at the mental, spiritual, and physical level.
Perhaps the experiences, of Queen Elizabeth Hospital illustrates undefined values of prayer as part of the healing process.
“Our prayer room, by contrast with most other local places of worship, is always open . . . and we occasionally get visitors, otherwise unrelated to the hospital, popping in with flowers on an anniversary – or as happened recently, a Buddhist needing somewhere to pray after sudden death of her brother-in-law in Sri Lanka.
“One of the joys of the prayer room journey, so far, has been the enriching experience of shared silences as we learn, on a daily basis, greater sensitivity to each other’s needs. On a small trellis, which screens the main doorway, the notices ask us to ‘pause for a moment’, ‘Come in Quietly’ and ‘Give others Space’.”
The example I am using here is from a highly developed country, but the importance of redefining hospital spaces to serve our purposes must be taken seriously in our country.
Some private medical facilities have spaces for visitors and those who take their sick there for treatment.
The public health facilities such as the Port Moresby General Hospital maternity ward and nursery need to provide facilities for mothers who need to talk to their relatives who visit them.