Premier hospital in need of special gear

 I AM sitting here looking out from my bed in awe of the sudden change to the country’s premier hospital, Port Moresby General Hospital. 

The infrastructure has changed so much in the last ten years the place in now looking and feeling more like a general hospital. 

However, beneath it all is the lack of life saving equipment which can only be found at a private hospital only a stone’s throw away, for example a kidney dialysis for assisting kidney affected patients and angiogram machine for detecting clog arteries. 

Even the X-Ray machines are operating at almost half the capacity.

POMGH is the “go to” hospital for the nation’s extremely sick population that cannot be handled by the aid posts, sub-health centres, health centres and provincial hospitals. So theoretically, it should be fully kitted to cater for those referrals, most of whom are village people commonly known as grassroots. 

Sadly this is not the case even after 40 years of independence POMGH is in dire need for state of the art health equipment.

If anything all our open MPs and Regional Governors should chip in to get this premier hospital fully functional to cater for referrals from their respective provinces for life saving treatments.  

While it is merely speculative that the government or certain politicians placed those two machines at that private hospital, those machines being there will only cater for the extremely rich group and not the grassroots. 

The grassroots, when diagnosed with life threatening illnesses requiring those machines just resign themselves to dying as there is no hope to find the money to pay for the use of these machines.  

Coming back to POMGH, why isn’t the government equipping the hospital, in the same way it is pumping money into the flyover and the sports stadiums which most often than not is for a select few?

I think the government has got its priorities all wrong. 

What do they care anyway?

 If the politician or their spouse or children is afflicted by a life threatening illness, they have the luxury of flying to the best hospitals overseas for treatment, while the people who put them in parliament just die needlessly.

Please Prime Minister Peter O’Neill, we have qualified personnel in POMGH wasting their knowledge and talents for want of life saving equipment. Please help!

Ieremia Aluviri

Konedobu, NCD