Don’t punish victims and spare culprits

Three nurses at Abim referral hospital have been threatened with disciplinary action and summoned to explain why they allowed the media to see the pathetic state of the government hospital.

The district’s Chief Administrative Officer and the ministry of Health spokesperson have already justified the action against the nurses for taking presidential candidate Dr Kizza Besigye around showing him the dilapidated state of the hospital whose appalling condition was captured by the media.

Presidential candidates need to visit problem areas and tell people how they intend to address them if they are elected into power. How else do the CAO and ministry of Health officials expect presidential candidates to address people’s problems if they do not know them?

Probably out of fear for embarrassment, the administrators are now disguising the charge against the nurses as having talked to the media without authority.

First of all the charges are misguided. The nurses did not call reporters or address a press conference about the hospital’s pathetic state. The allegation of talking to the media without authority appears a flimsy excuse to justify the reprimand against the innocent nurses who have kept the hospital running amidst these painful conditions. They are just victims of the country’s collapsed healthcare system which their investigators have been presiding over for years. Shame.

The officials investigating the nurses for alleged breach of the public service rules are the ones who should be under investigation instead. This rot at the hospital has been going on for years and they had never notified the government for redress.

This hospital built in the 1960s with a 200-bed capacity currently has only 20 beds and almost every unit of the hospital has been run down. The hospital has had no doctor for two years and one can imagine how many patients have died at this hospital in such circumstances.

Four days after the Saturday tour of the hospital, the Resident District Commissioner rushed to do a ground-breaking for renovations and hopefully more will follow.

The RDC is claiming the government had already engaged a contractor to renovate the hospital. But what was the government waiting for close to 50 years since the hospital was built? In fact, the nurses should be exalted as heroes for exposing this rot and awakening the government to act.

Instead of punishing these heroic nurses, reprimand their tormentors for keeping quiet while the government hospital was rotting away under their watch and people were shamefully denied healthcare.