Hospitals are places of hope where patients renew their relationship with life. By their nature, hospitals are places where people have to be cured of diseases but in many cases, scores of public hospitals have turned into places where people go not to get treated but to contract diseases.
\nIn fact, poor sanitation, according to health experts, causes 25 percent of deaths in all hospitals in Malawi.
\nIn August last year, for example, Medical Council of Malawi came close to closing Dowa District Hospital for poor sanitation.
\nThe hospital did not have any functional toilets, hence posing a serious threat to lives of patients and guardians.
\nBut you would be wrong to think that this cannot happen at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH), the biggest referral hospital in the country. Apparently, it is worse there.
\nToilet and bathroom drainage channels, especially for Paediatric Orthopedics and Oncology wards at QECH, are blocked and expose filth that guardians and patients endure daily when they want to take a bath or relieve themselves.
\nIn the bathroom, the dirty water \u2013 perhaps infested with all types of germs \u2013 is almost knee deep to most of the children, making it almost impossible for the children admitted to these wards to take a bath.
\nIn the toilets, faecal matters hardly get through but the children and their guardians are being forced to use the facilities as there is no alternative.
\nOne of the guardians of a child admitted to Paediatric Orthopedics Ward we will call Chikumbutso says lives her son and her are in danger.
\nShe says she cannot take her 12-year-old son to the toilets in their current state and instead her son uses a plate as a toilet.
\n\u201cThe situation is pathetic. We are at a very risk of contracting hygiene-related diseases. I cannot bring my child here ad it is not only me. Most of the children here are using plates as toilets and we are emptying them into the toilets so that at least our children are safe,\u201d she says.
\nMost of the children, especially in the Paediatric Orthopedics Ward, have broken arms and legs and they cannot walk to the toilets or bathrooms by themselves.
\nIf they are to visit the toilets or bathrooms, therefore, it is their guardians mostly who carry them on their backs to the potential house of diseases that the toilets and bathrooms are.
\nAnother guardian we will call Janet says she has been in the ward for almost a month but the situation in the toilets has been like that.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s almost a month since I came. But even then, I found the toilets like that. Fellow guardians I found here say they too found the toilets and bathrooms like that since they came. We are suffering and we don\u2019t know whether the Minister of Health is aware of this,\u201d she says
\nSources within the hospital say the blockages have been reported to the Maintenance Department several times but to no avail.
\nThe sources say the toilets and bathrooms were declared beyond maintenance and it is not known when or if they will be maintained.
\n\u201cIt is not that the management does not know about this. We have reported the blockages several times and they maintenance people have been inspecting the toilets and the bathrooms but nothing has happened. We are told that they are actually beyond maintenance,\u201d they say.
\nHealth Rights Education Programme Executive Director Maziko Matemba calls on government to wake up and treat the problem as matter of urgency.
\n\u201cIt is unacceptable for any health facility to run without proper hygiene. The Minister of Health should deal with the problem as matter of urgency. The Medical Council of Malawi should inspect the wards and act accordingly because they have all the powers according to the law,\u201d Matemba says.
\nBut while people are suffering like this at QECH, massive looting of public funds continues at the Ministry of Health which runs the facility.
\nAudit report of 2015\/2016 financial year says about K1 billion was blown on dubious allowances alone at the ministry.
\nThe report says K265 million was paid out in allowances to officers which were not bona fide servants, K399 million was paid out to people that cannot be traced whereas K61 million was paid out to undeserving staff.
\nPerhaps one wonders what such amounts can do to the sanitation problems at QECH.
\nBut speaking during the commemoration of World Toilet Day on November 18 in Blantyre, Head of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in the Ministry of Health Mawumsamatha Kafanikhale said there is a close relationship between poor sanitaion and diseases and deaths in the country.
\nHe said 50 percent of people admited to public hospitals suffer from diseases connected to poor sanitation while up to 25 percent of all deaths are due to poor sanitation.
\n\u201cSo you can see that it is impotrtat that people observe proper hygiene practices so that they do not fall sick and die,\u201d he said.
\nIt is, therefore, dishaertening that people are being subjected to poor sanition right at the country\u2019s biggest referal hospital that is QECH.
\nBut Minister of Health Atupele Muluzi says he is aware of the poor sanitation at QECH.
\nMuluzi says officials at his ministry are on the ground fiding ways of dealing with the situation saying most of the problem is to do with the hospital administration.
\n\u201cThere is a close relation betweeen poor sanitaion and diesesas and we are taking sanitaion very very seriously,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hospitals are places of hope where patients renew their relationship with life. By their nature, hospitals are places where people have to be cured of diseases but in many cases, scores of public hospitals have turned into places where people go not to get treated but to contract diseases. In fact, poor sanitation, according to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":58919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58918"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58921,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58918\/revisions\/58921"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}