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No need to “lager” to make money

28 janvier 2013, 00:00

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The Jeetoo hospital, also known as the Civil hospital, in contrast to a military hospital from colonial times which has been rebuilt, has cost a colossal amount of taxpayers’ money.

Any Government has a duty to provide adequate medical facilities and services for the population and the Jeetoo hospital claims to be a modern institution capable of meeting the needs of everyone afflicted with a medical problem. It appears that a male nurse who was on duty went to the toilet to inject drugs into himself and unfortunately he overdosed himself in the early hours of the morning. The overdose killed him.

This is symptomatic of a lack of control over the dangerous drugs which seem to be freely available to the hospital staff. It is important to have an audit on institutions like hospitals in order to ascertain the level of waste which prevails at our expense. The mentality that any one can have a go and a take on and at public funds is so common that one is left to wonder if at all there is any kind of governance in the country.

The Jeetoo hospital is a modern building which ought to respond to all the requirements of Port Louis and the outlying areas.

In normal circumstances, the hospital should have been self- suffi cient for meeting the needs of all patients. But once again those who were responsible for the design of the building in order to accommodate all medical services have been inept and, in the process, the amount of space which is empty and unutilized is horrendous. It is fine to walk in there and feel like one is in a 5- star hotel, but that is not the mission of a hospital. Large areas which are unused simply to give one the feeling of airy spaces constitute a drain on public resources. Any architect endowed with a minimum of intelligence on the optimization of space would have done a far better job in ensuring that every available space at the hospital was put to maximum use. This is what is called the utilitarian approach and in any case this is elementary.

But then comes the news that space opposite the Jeetoo hospital has been rented by the Government for the purpose of housing a few hospital beds and services. Obviously the rented premises belong to a private person and the amount of rent paid by the Government, and by extension all taxpayers, runs into hundreds of thousands of our rupees.

We cannot but request that the non- optimization of space at the Jeetoo hospital deserves an audit.

There is a mood at work in the country that, like drugs which are easily available to medical staff of hospitals for their private use, public money can be squandered to enrich those who are close to the people who are in power.