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By Kisean Joseph
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The mother of a 12-year-old boy who had a negative experience at the Sir Lester Bird Medical Centre (SLBMC) on Monday is giving kudos to the medical facility for issuing an apology regarding the incident.
The hospital issued an apology after the mother and her injured son encountered the issue at the emergency department having not received medical care, despite waiting four hours.
Ashley George took her 12-year-old son Adonyjah to the hospital after he suffered an injury while playing football.
George, during an interview with Observer media, said the ball struck him in the face, causing severe swelling and a bloodshot eye.
“Apparently while they [Adonyjah and his older brother] were playing football in the yard, he head-butted the ball, and the ball was too hard because it’s a new ball, and [it] hit him in his eye,” George said.
“So, after icing it for about an hour, and I finally get to lift the lid up, I saw that it was bloodshot.”
George said she became particularly concerned when her son told her he had gone to sleep immediately after the impact, which she considered “a major red flag” for potential head trauma, especially since their yard has a concrete surface.
After arriving at the hospital, the family waited for four hours, during which Adonyjah began experiencing vision problems.
“So, I started to get fussy when he started to tell me his vision was blurry, and I was like, ‘you can’t see out the eye now? He said, Mom, I can’t see. It’s blurry.”
At 10:36pm, a nurse announced to the waiting room that doctors would not be seeing any more patients after the 11pm shift change and only one doctor would be on call who would only see “dire emergencies”, she said the nurse announced.
When George approached staff to ask whether her son’s condition qualified as a dire emergency, she was directed to a triage nurse.
“I was like, my son has a head injury and his eyes obviously bloodshot. And so, I just need to know if this is not constituted as a dire emergency,” George said she asked the nurse.
However, she said she felt dismissed by the triage nurse and received no proper assessment, even though she noticed that blood was running from her son’s eye.
The family left without receiving care, and George said she had to arrange private medical treatment for her son.
“You can obviously see blood is running from the eye. “My son came outside and he started to cry like, ‘mommy, what’s going to happen; am I going to be blind?’ And I’m standing there without any answers because I can’t tell him; I’m not a medical doctor,” an emotional George, who was moved to tears at this point, told Observer.
She described the manner in which they were treated at SLBMC as “unacceptable” and “deplorable”, emphasizing that this is the only public hospital available to citizens.
She added that this was not her first negative experience at the facility.
“This is people and their lives that up there is messing with. They’re playing with people’s lives,” George said.
She noted however that SLBMC’s Medical Director, Dr Shivon Belle-Jarvis later reached out to her, and that the conversation was amicable. The Medical Director, she said, recognized that if those on duty had taken the time out to do what they took an oath to, things would have been different. She noted that it’s unfortunate that it took this incident to highlight weak areas at the medical facility, which have also been highlighted in the past by others.
George said that the hospital staff and facility “needs work”.
“In terms of how I feel as a mother, the anguish … has passed. It has passed solely because I went to a private doctor to get him treated and so my nerves are settled knowing now what I didn’t know before,” she said. The experience has left a bad taste in her mouth, she added, because she had to spend money which she had not anticipated she would spend.
In response to the incident, SLBMC issued a statement saying, “We are deeply sorry to learn about the experience recently shared on social media regarding care in our Emergency Department. No patient or family should feel dismissed or uncertain about the seriousness of their condition.”
The hospital acknowledged that “steps should have been taken to properly assess and clearly communicate with patients in the Emergency Room that night”.
SLBMC admitted it faces staffing challenges in the Emergency Department and that it is “actively working to strengthen our systems and staffing to minimize the impact on patients and families when these pressures occur.”
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