Hospital Rant

The past couple weeks I have spent a lot of time at the Kenyatta National Hospital. It is suppose to be the best national hospital in all of Eastern African: patients come from 4 different countries to be treated at this hospital. Kind of like the Cleveland Clinic…except they cannot be compared in any ways! This hospital is absolutely shocking, from the aesthetics of it, to the functioning aspects. The rooms are huge wards with 10-12 beds (some even have people on the floor because they are out of beds), no color on the walls and absolutely no TV’s for patients to get their minds off their situations. One of the patients I visited had dried blood on his gown and his sheets, 2 days in a row- I’m hoping it was his. The most horrific thing I saw was in the hallway of the hospital. When I was turning the corner from the stairs I saw fairly large spots of fresh blood puddled on the floor. At first I made myself believe it couldn’t be blood, but after getting a good look at it, I could confirm it was blood, and a lot of it (see picture). When I went to leave the hall 45 minutes late the blood was still there, nobody had come to clean it up. I could not believe that especially in a place where blood transmits disease so rapidly nobody would be rushing to clean it up. Sanitation would be a concern for me if I were a patient there.
And obviously, before I shared the problem that the hospital had run out of basic nutritional needs for the patients for over a week. When we went to inquire about the medicine Samuel, our patient needed, the matron nurse on the floor didn’t even know they were out of it- so she obviously was not keeping up with our patients condition in the past week. When I voiced my concern that the kid would fail to heal if he didn’t have proper nutrients she was surprised I knew that and asked if I had medical background. I had to laugh and say, no, in fact I know very little, but I do know that much! Another disturbing event was when I was speaking with the doctor (as handsome as he was) in the middle of the hallway and he continued to fill syringes with unidentified liquids and casually hand them off to nurses. Yikes.

Needless to say, I was brainstorming a way to get little Samuel out of this place- but it is the “best” hospital so nobody would go for that. So where is the problem among all this craziness? I am going to suggest the government, since they run the hospital. They pay their doctors and nurses significantly less than deserved, which doesn’t make them work very hard and they do not provide the hospital with the proper medical needs for the patients. It is a very sad sight to see the leading national hospital in such a state. I have to remind myself that Kenya is only 40 years old and we had similar cases when we were a young country as well. But I also want to believe that we can guide these younger countries so they don’t make the same mistakes and have the same problems that we had and have since overcome.

On a better note, Samuel is doing better than before. He is receiving the proper nutrients he needs and went in for another surgery on Tuesday to hopefully close the leak in his intestine. After that leak is fixed he should be well on his way to recovery- I hope. This week, time was not in my favor and I did not have a chance to visit him after the surgery to check the progress, but I haven’t received a call either, which is good news! Hopefully late next week I can confirm his progress. Please keep him in your prayers, as he is just very sad and in a lot of pain. We took him some story books to read and he loved them, he is a bright boy. His uncle was reading them to him and he was drawing pictures on the back cover as we left. We also took him cards that his classmates made for him which brightened his day a bit to see that they remember him.