Service to resume at Mount Hagen Hospital in PNG

Transcript

Health care services at Mount Hagen General Hospital in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea are expected to fully resume on Monday after intervention from the Doctors Association.

Medical staff at the hospital walked off the job 10 days ago in protest at what they say is a misappropriation of funds by the Provincial Health Authority.

On Thursday, Ben Robinson-Drawbridge spoke with the secretary of the Doctors Association, Sam Yokopua.

Sam Yokopua: There is a situational crisis in Mount Hagen General Hospital. It's simply because the doctors and the nurses are simply fed up of working under the current hospital board and the hospital management. They are fed up of three people in particular. Number one: the hospital board chairman, number two: there is a controversial deputy chief executive officer, number three is the director of corporate services.

Ben Robinson-Drawbridge: So what exactly is the doctors' grievance?

SY: The infrastructure has been run down, a lot of money has been pumped in, but these people have diverted this money for their own purposes and they've no interest in dealing with patients. Number two: the medical equipment, consumables and drugs are not supplied when the clinicians request for those. Priorities are not given to patient care. Priorities are given to other things which are not related to patient care. I will give you an example, the main operating theatre has been down for eight months now. So what the doctors and nurses are doing are correctly right because they have to fight for their patients. And these three people, these controversial people must be removed because they can easily be replaced, whereas professional people like doctors and nurses, it's very hard to get them in place.

SY: The patients have come back and two of the doctors have been assaulted, one of them is a female, because lack of medicines, not enough consumables and one of the patients actually passed away. Health workers, they are the frontliners and they had to cop the blame for the failures by the administration.

SY: So the president of the National Doctors Association, Dr James Naipao, and myself we had to fly up on Tuesday. We intervened to stop the process and we told the doctors to go back to work while we take care of their situation and ensure that normalcy is brought about. So the Minister has brought about certain solutions and one of them was to get the finance investigators, another one was to get the Auditor General to investigate. So those investigators flew up this morning to Mount Hagen.

BRD: So you're hopeful that by tomorrow the hospital will be operating again?

SY: We are very optimistic and we instructed our members and they are co-operative now. Whatever their concerns are we'll raise with the relevant authorities with some deadline we'll give seven days or maybe 14 days, and then by Monday we hope to have everybody back to work with good support from the administration.