I HAD TO CHOOSE WHO SHOULD DIE & WHO SHOULD LIVE: While government officials, particularly those from the Ministry of Health, were assuring Ugandans that the situation was under control during a health workers’ strike a few years ago, intern doctors on duty had to decide who lives and who does not make it, a former intern doctor at Kiruddu Hospital has told Dr Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, the chief organizer of the Uganda Health Exhibition.
An online exposé of the rot in Uganda’s health sector, the #UgandaHealthExhibition is meant to shed more light on the appalling state of health facilities and provision of health services as well as the plight of health workers, including pre-intern doctors, some of whom were arrested today, April 24 morning as they demonstrated over government’s and the Ministry of Health’s failure to deploy them yet health practice is a prerequisite for their employment.
The way MoH is ignoring pre-intern doctors would make it appear like they are not useful for the national referral hospitals, regional referral hospitals, and health centres. However, interns are key in delivery of services in congested Ugandan hospitals where there are way fewer health workers than the number of patients.
However, if the confession by this former intern at Kiruddu National Referral Hospital is anything to go by, then failure by government to deploy the interns could spell doom for the thousands of patients seeking hope in an already ailing health system.
Choosing to share anonymously because s/he is currently a public servant fearing the consequences of coming out to expose a health ministry that would rather keep the dirt inside the walls of health facilities a secret, the exhibitor revealed how s/he was overwhelmed while serving as an intern doctor at Kiruddu.
S/he confesses that while doctors under the Uganda Medical Association (UMA) had gone on strike demanding for salary increment, s/he was assigned to lead a night shift for an emergency unit at Kiruddu, together with two enrolled nurses
“I would want to share about my time as an intern doctor a couple of years ago when I lost a record 8 patients within 12 hours at Kiruddu National Referral Hospital. This was a time when a certain cohort of intern doctors had finished their rotations and had been signed off. A few of us who had not yet finished our clinical rotations were asked to distribute ourselves equally to run the facility,” the exhibitor who hit Ssentongo’s DM to share what s/he went through wrote, according to screenshots shared by the chief organizer of the Uganda Health Exhibition.
“Our senior doctors were by then under the UMA strike for some weeks. That’s how I found myself, one night, running an emergency unit of a National Referral Hospital ALONE with just 2 enrolled nurses from 8pm to 8am.”
Exhausted and overwhelmed by the number of emergencies, the exhibitor recalled that at least eight patients died in just 12 hours yet these ones’ lives would have been saved had senior doctors been on duty. S/he even confessed that s/he remembers making a “stupid mistake” that prematurely ended the life of a patient.
This experience would later throw this intern doctor into depression, keeping him/her at home for weeks.
“By midnight, mortalities were already 6. The number rose to 8 before I handed over to the next intern doctor at 8am. They died because I was overwhelmed. I would receive more than 1 critical patient at ago. So I would choose who to save and who to let go (a situation you can never imagine yourself in),” s/he further wrote.
“I remember I even lost someone due to a stupid mistake I made because of mental exhaustion which I feel had suppressed my clinical reasoning. This had never happened to me, and I was depressed for 2 DAYS. Locked in my room. Btw intern doctors are heroes in those referral hospitals.”
You can read more on the shocking revelations on the sorry state of Uganda’s health sector as shared by exhibitors in the Uganda Health Exhibition HERE.
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