MADINAH, 4 June 2007 — The story of Bakita Al- Juhani, an elderly Saudi woman, illustrates how a patient can fall through the cracks in the public hospital setup.
According to a report recently in the daily Al-Madinah, Al-Juhani was left stranded in a wheelchair at the airport even as she was being transferred from King Faisal Specialist Hospital (KFSH) in Riyadh to a hospital in Madinah.
Her son Falah Al-Juhani described the experience as “a trip of sorrow and torture.” It wasn’t until Falah called the Saudi Red Crescent Society that his mother finally got a ride to Madinah’s King Fahd Hospital (KFH) only to sit in a waiting room there for five hours before hospital staff signed her in.
“The KFSH (in Riyadh) had arranged with King Fahd Hospital and sent a fax that specified the flight that my mother was on; the hospital also provided a detailed report about her case,” said Falah, who pointed out that the Red Crescent Society responded immediately to his call while the KFH apparently forgot about his mother.
Falah said: “Then my mother remained in the ER for five hours. Whenever I consulted any doctor the only response I got was ‘this is not my specialization.’” Falah said that he went to the medical manager who told him that his mother’s case is critical and the KFSH should have not transferred her at all.
“It was a shocking statement,” he said.
“How can they know that her case is critical and still leave her (sitting in the waiting room) without treatment?” The medical manager then asked Falah to speak to the hospital’s general manager while his elderly mother sat in a waiting room by herself. “The manager asked a doctor to accept my mother,” he said.
But then, according to Falah, the intensive care ward where his mother was to be admitted was full so she was transferred to a basic hospital room with five other patients.
“The room smelled bad and there were mosquitoes and flies everywhere,” he said, claiming that he paid a doctor SR1,500 to get his mother into a room of her own.
“I went out to buy some stuff and when I came back I didn’t find the doctor to whom I had paid the money. And the new doctor refused to let us go to the room,” he said.
After Falah went to the Madinah Health Affairs Office to complain about what happened, he did manage to get his mother her own room at the hospital. But he claims the delays worsened his mother’s condition. She couldn’t breathe or feed on her own and, he said, “doctors at the hospital said that they do not know how to deal with these tubes and they had to wait for a doctor to come from Uhud Hospital.” Falah then claimed that the hospital asked him to supply the feeding tube for his mother. “I called my relatives in Madinah and Jeddah but we could not find a compatible tube. To my surprise the hospital then provided a tube. Why did they make us search like crazy when they had the tube all along?” The manager of King Fahd Hospital, Mutawkil Hajjaj, denies that the patient requires intensive care but that her condition is such that it requires six specialists to treat her. He also denied that they would ask patients to provide their own equipment.
