GPHC to tackle “bad attitude” of nurses, doctors – CEO

In admitting that some nurses and doctors at the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPHC) have “bad attitudes”, Chief Executive Officer of the Hospital, Brigadier (Ret’d) George Lewis during an interview with Guyana Times said the entity is working to tackle the issue through training.

The CEO explained to this newspaper that he received many complaints from patients when it comes to the attitude of nurses as well as some doctors.
“The behaviour of not only nurses but of healthcare workers in general has not been one that is acceptable,” he said.
Lewis was keen to note that while some healthcare workers may have unacceptable attitudes, there are a number of other dedicated and hardworking professionals who ought to be recognised for their service as well. “However, in every barrel there might be one and two bad apples and we are working to address that,” he said.
According to him, the Hospital hopes to address this issue through training for their health workers.
“When we address it through training we are looking at letting the persons understand what is the acceptable behaviour (and) what we expect from them and we think that by providing training, it will help to alleviate the situation,” the CEO noted.
He was sure to point out that the attitude of those healthcare providers will not change overnight but the Hospital will “over a period of time” reduce the amount of reports being received.
According to him, training has begun with those healthcare providers. He explained, “We are doing training with two fronts. In some cases it’s in-house, locally at Georgetown Public Hospital where we are doing customer care training. In some cases, we bring in facilitators from outside of the Hospital.”
In addition, he said that a number of other programmes are ongoing at the Accident and Emergency Department which is working along with a University by the name of Vanderbilt. These programmes are designed to help the Emergency nurses when it comes to professionalism, behaviour, attitude, knowledge and other areas the CEO said.
“We are hoping that over time and with training, we are going to eliminate this problem,” the optimistic head asserted.
Patients have often times complained about not getting quality service at the GPHC.