What happened to me when I went to the Casualty ward of NHSL – Colombo?
A note by Mr. Prasanga Alwis
Today at around 12.00 noon, I received a message that a friend who works with us had an accident while driving a motorcycle in the Colombo Fort area and was admitted to the emergency unit of the Colombo National Hospital. Immediately after that, he left the office with me and my friend. His family lives a little away from Colombo. To help if needed due to distance. Meanwhile, we went to the hospital as soon as possible, remembering the method of admitting patients in a hospital in Sri Lanka and the hustle and bustle that must be done for it.
When I went there, he also arrived at that moment and he was sitting in a wheelchair at the admissions office. His left arm was broken near the ankle and a leg near the heel. He was in great pain at that moment. First we had to go to the place where the patients were admitted. All the patient’s details were entered into a laptop computer at once. Three laptops and two printers were installed with three nurses at the entrance of the patients. It took about three minutes and a bar code was printed from the printer and handed over to us. When we were about to push the wheelchair there, a nurse came and said, “I will take it, sir.” He stopped the wheelchair next to the doctor. As soon as the doctor took the bar code presented to the patient and entered a number in the laptop computer he had, all the entered data appeared on the doctor’s laptop computer when the patient entered it. The doctor only asked the patient about the details of the disease. Then the doctor pointed to a nearby room and asked to take the patient there.
A nurse there gave the patient a strong painkiller. The painkiller has to be injected into the patient’s body through the anus, so we had to take him to the toilet. It was in the toilet that I realized that I was definitely seeing this in a dream. The toilet smelled of fresh flowers. Very neat. dry After that they told to take the patient near the x-ray room. The nurse employed there was very efficient.She addressed the patients as sir and miss while entering and exiting the x-ray room. Our patient also left the x-ray room, after which she said to show the patient again to the doctor who had shown the patient in the first place. Surprisingly, the x-ray image of the patient appeared on the screen of the doctor’s laptop. But installing such a system in a government hospital and implementing it more efficiently than a private hospital is a strange and surprising thing in comparison with other government institutions in our country. Then the doctor gave us the paper with the bar code and told us to register the patient and file a complaint with the police unit in the hospital due to an accident. I took the paper and went to the patient registration room and as soon as I presented the barcode paper to the attendant, she scanned it with a scanner. On her laptop computer, only the information required to register from the patient’s information appeared. After that, he took it to the hospital police and it took less than five minutes for the police officer there to write the complaint. After that, the patient was given basic treatment and other tests. After that, the patient was admitted to the emergency ward. The time taken to do all these things was 45 minutes. only
The staff of the emergency unit is in a rush. There is no one who is not working there. The hospital is very clean. During our stay, I saw the public toilet being cleaned twice with soapy liquid. Only the walls of the hospital were crumbling and dirty. It must be that the government does not have the money to repair them
At this time I had to go to another ward to visit my cousin. When I told her this story, she said that the ward is cleaned three times a day with antiseptic liquid and the toilets are cleaned four times a day.
It is unbelievable that the National Hospital of Sri Lanka is in this condition at a time when almost all the government institutions in Sri Lanka are extremely corrupt. There may be more such government institutions, but only the institutions that do wrong are known and shown in the media. Most of the people in our country are only interested in seeing someone’s mistakes somewhere. That’s why the media shows such propaganda. If we can spread this kind of thing in the social media space as much as possible, defeating the rotten media culture will not be a difficult task. That appreciation will be an incentive for the employees of another government institution to make a change that will be felt in their own institution.
