Maravi

Kitwe doctor blames medical personnel for Robiana's case

Kitwe doctor blames medical personnel for Robiana's case
By Fridah Nkonde
Sat 07 Apr. 2012, 13:28 CAT

KITWE district medical officer Dr Chikafuna Banda says the case of Livingstone's Robiana Muteka was a result of negligence on the part of the medical personnel. And Dr Banda says the referral system in Zambia needs improving.

Commenting on health minister Dr Joseph Kasonde's statement in Livingstone this week that Robiana's case was a wake-up call for Ministry of Health staff, Dr Banda, in an interbiew, said doctors in Livingstone, especially those that knew about Robiana's case, could have done something before the tumour grew.

"It was going to be better if the tumour was dealt with before it grew that big. The young man had to carry that mass for years. He could not sit or sleep for a long time because of his condition. Honestly, it is evident that Robiana used to go to the hospital, but was never attended to, hence his family giving up on his case. This simply shows that the referral system in our country is not good enough," he said.

Dr Banda said 14 kilogrammes of a tumour "was just too much".

"One doctor does not hold an opinion for the whole Ministry of Health. It must have been only one doctor who thought the case was complicated and kept quiet about it. When you are a doctor and you feel you cannot work on a patient, maybe because you are not that qualified for a specific case, the best you can do is to call others to help," he said.

Dr Banda said doctors had an obligation to inform higher and more competent authority to attend to cases which proved too complicated for them.

He said if UTH failed to work on a patient, it was also their responsibility to evacuate patients abroad for specialist treatment.

"It is like the way we do it in Kitwe; we have patients with brain problems. So we identify those that have serious cases and we take them to UTH. We can't just keep them here because we know that there are experts that can work on them at UTH," he said.

Dr Kasonde told The Post in Livingstone that UTH had had historical records of Robiana's plight and that he should have been returning to the institution for reviews.

And last weekend, former permanent secretary in the MMD government Peter Mumba observed that Robiana's case was a result of bad attitudes in public health facilities.

"It is quite embarrassing on the part of our health providers that it had to take the entire President to step in the matter that should not have been allowed to grow and reach the proportion it did…What this successful operation shows is that the problem in the country is not capacity or skill or even the money. As a country, we have got medical doctors with unparalleled levels of skill and expertise as they demonstrated in that operation but the problem is attitude," said Mumba.

"These problems are not just discovered, they are there. What happened to the hospitals where he Robiana was going? Did they see the need to refer him Robiana to UTH? Why did they allow the problem to escalate to the levels it reached? They need to explain…So, what is happening to other cases, especially in the lower rungs of society, those that don't have the money - the poor? These operations don't even need colossal sums of money. So, we need to change the attitudes of our health providers."

And Dr Banda said it was sad that 16-year-old Eunice Katukula of Chingola succumbed to breast cancer after being evacuated to UTH.

He said it was very unfortunate that Eunice died at 16 years when the breast cancer would have been treated if medication had been administered early enough.

"The young girl was not supposed to be kept at home. She was supposed to be in hospital undergoing treatment. The breast cancer she had reached a very advanced stage," said Dr Banda.

"…The other problem was that Eunice's family gave up and she also gave up because there was no improvement whatsoever."

Labels: HEALTHCARE, UTH

posted by MrK @ 7:08 PM