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The initiative of the Smart Hospital in various parts of the country is very commendable. This gives the people who are seeking various services of a medical nature an advantage in not having to visit the Georgetown Public Hospital. Visiting the GPH is a very stressful and daunting exercise and almost everyone who visit these Smart Hospitals wish that they would not be asked to visit the GPH. This letter is presented to register the disappointment of quite a number of pensioners who visited the eye clinic at the Diamond Smart Hospital recently. 

I was one of the pensioners that received my spectacles over two years ago and realized that I need to have it changed. When I went to Diamond two years ago, the hospital was not yet smart. The process was simple and straight forward. Blood sugar was tested along with blood pressure. If either one was too high, no examination would be done until another day when both blood pressure and blood sugar readings were normal. This was fine.

Your eyes would be examined by someone using a medical apparatus, then you are sent to the person and room to be tested for the spectacles. Now, if your blood sugar is high you are not told to go back when it would be under control, you are sent to a doctor who would then ask that you do an A1C test at GPH or a private hospital. Then to somewhere else (perhaps in the same hospital) to take out pictures of the eyes condition. Then when this is done you have to schedule a new date with the eye clinic for further action; not forgetting that the visit to the GPH is not a one day affair.

When I visited the Lab at Diamond to get my A1C done, the attendant informed me that the machine was out of order and that I had to get the test done in Georgetown. I met someone today who went to the eye clinic in Diamond, he is a pensioner who lives in Timehri. I asked him about his visit there and he was very critical. He had been asked to do some tests in GPH and to take the results along with pictures of his eyes’ condition back to Diamond. He is eighty years old and decided that he preferred to remain as he is because it was too stressful to visit the hospital in Georgetown.

I can assure that my case along with the 80-year-old man are not isolated. In my case, I will visit a private provider who will test my eyes for the spectacles, I will ensure that my sugar reading and pressure readings are acceptable. I will not be stressed out by these lengthy waiting in Georgetown, one day for the test and another day or two for the results. I am sure that these smart hospitals were created or established to make services easily accessible to people, and to ease the volume of people visiting the GPH.

I would entreat the Minister of Health to intervene in such cases where equipment are eternally out of order, where services of an area of operation must not be split into parts to be done at different locations. All related interventions must be accessible in the same compound. What sense does it make to split a certain service to different places? Only to frustrate the beleaguered? 

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