And Dr Alain Gonzalez who worked in the emergency room spoke about specific shortages of materials that diminish the quality of care they can offer patients in the public system:
Dr. Alain Gonzalez, Union Executive
"I spoke to one of my doctors this morning and they told me that a young man came in with a fracture to his knee. We needed to put a full cast on the patient. The doctor actually told me that he had to send the patient to go and buy the cast material which is the fiberglass. Each little bag of the fiberglass costs $45. So what we are saying is that the private and all the other maybe institutions out there have the material. Why is it that KHMH don't have the material and this is not been happening just now, it has been happening for a while."
"Last week I had to put on a cast for a patient from high school. The patient came after playing football, fractures his tibia and I had to put a cast. We didn't have cast. I had to end up putting 2 different color casts on the patient, because we didn't have the cast material."
"It's not only cast, its catheter, gloves, sutures, IV set, inferior syringes - it's a lot of different things. We had a patient who we had to put an IV line on, a little girl. She was about 8 years old and we had to place that IV line at least about 3 times, because the tape that we were using to secure the IV line wouldn't stick to the patient's skin. The tape actually came off about 2-3 times, so we have to pinch the child more than 3 times to secure that IV line, because the tape that we were using was inferior tape and didn't held properly on the patient's skin. So its little things like these that we have been complaining about and the staff morale, the frustration of the staff has gotten to a high now that we need to do something, so that administration, ministry listens to us and they understand what frustration we are going through."
Jules Vasquez
"When we see this as a chronic problem, what it says is that somebody is buying inferior supplies - that's fine. But the ministry is then buying it from them. Somebody is acquiring it and the ministry if buying it from them. Whenever we see this happens, one of two things are at play: either a lack of quality control or someone incompetent or uncaring people monitoring what the ministry gets or corruption is at play where there is some friend or some higher up and they say just send in the thing, I get, you get and then we short the patient. What from your instinct and experience is at play here?"
Dr. Alain Gonzalez, Union Executive
"One of the things that I brought up specifically in the meeting yesterday with the ministry is that whoever is tendering the medication, the equipment - something is wrong there, because that person whoever is doing it have no type of medical background. They are just going and buying maybe the cheapest stuff and then I don't know where it comes into the ministry, but the ministry has to purchase it from the tendering people and that's where I think the issue is."
Andrew Baird, President, KHMHWU
"Within the tendering process, there is not a sampling process. So they purchase the materials basically on a face value type of thing where I buy it and when it reach its then you know its not good. We are saying you need to have a sampling process."
