Lying on a bed in one of the rooms in Tripoli Hospital, Sabah was crying after giving birth.
Suffering from postpartum hypertension, following a difficult pregnancy, the doctor prescribed Sabah an injection after the nurse had measured her soaring blood pressure.
Many women in the ward were suffering from high blood pressure – until it turned out that the measuring device was broken.
Lying on a bed in one of the rooms in Tripoli Hospital, Sabah was crying after giving birth.
Suffering from postpartum hypertension, following a difficult pregnancy, the doctor prescribed Sabah an injection after the nurse had measured her soaring blood pressure.
Many women in the ward were suffering from high blood pressure – until it turned out that the measuring device was broken.
Sabah, like all expectant mothers, are only allowed in the maternity ward of the state-owned Tripoli Medical Center when their husbands sign to take responsibility for their newborns, should they need incubators or special care. The ward, which receives patients form Tripoli and neighbouring areas for years, lacks basic medicines and equipment. Conditions in the ward are cramped and challenging.
Obstetrician Huda Qareini complained about her inability to help the women in her care. “The ward suffers a severe shortage of medicines of hemorrhage, painkillers, injections and anticoagulants often needed by women suffering hypertension throughout their pregnancy,” she said.
Her colleague, Dr. Awatef Sharif, said a patient’s relatives routinely have to provide necessary medicines from outside the hospital. “Cases arriving in the hospital late at night and requiring such medicines are exposed to danger or even death since most pharmacies are closed at such a time,” explained Sharif. “We have to ask women whom we expect to have postpartum hemorrhage to bring medications, and in case that does not happen, we ask them to leave the medicines to be used in urgent cases of other women.”
Nurse Intisar Tawerghi said it was not only the patients who lacked care. She said they did not even have the most basic rights, especially on evening shifts, when they were often forced to have dinner in the changing room of the operating theatre. “The ward lacks toilets and hot water since water heaters are not working, and there is only one usable bathroom,” said Tawerghi,
Patients complained about the absence of toilets and said the only working bathroom was used by staff and patients.
The administrative employee on-duty, Adel Msharri, said the toilets had not been fixed and kept in working order because their pipes were above the operating room, meaning that repairs would force the hospital to close the room for a while. That would be impractical, given the large numbers of women arriving from across the region in the late stages of labour. “Not long ago, a technical breakdown happened in the Operating and ICU Ward on the first floor, which increased the temperature there. Technical specialists fixed it; however, they neglected the problem of the WCs in the ward,” he added.
Msharri said while a surgery was being performed for a woman, a WC pipe burst, “polluting the operating room, and causing the woman whose wound was still open severe infections.”
He suggested that the hospital administration should allow maternity ward doctors to use the Central Operating Theatre until basic maintenance is carried out.
“The ward lacks about 70 percent of the medicines (it needs) and that obliges the doctor to ask the patient’s relatives to fetch them,” said Msharri, suggesting that he previously had to “buy tools for serum bags needed by a newborn” from his own money.
Despite the medical staff’s attempts to carry out their job, it is impossible to overcome the formidable obstacles and patients suffered, they said.
Despite its urgent problems, the ward is always overcrowded as there are no alternatives. The ward, like other vital public utilities, is waiting for state funds and maintenance urgently needed across the health sector.
