Dear Editor,
I turned up at the New Amsterdam Hospital’s Dental Clinic, taking time off from my work, to have a filling done, only to be told that there was no dental chair, hence, “you will have to check back next month.” This is most horrible since I was waiting to have this operation done for over a month—on a waiting list at this clinic! I have heard horror stories about services (and medication) not being available to the general public and here was my first experience of that.
I would like to know what is really going on at this hospital. Why isn’t there a chair at the dental clinic? Where is the new one and why was it not installed? What really is being done at the dental clinic in the meantime? Where is the staff? What will be done to those persons whose dates have reached and expired? Will they be made to wait another couple of months to be seen? The attendant who told me to check back next month, behaved too as if I was bothering her from knitting! That’s the nonsense that goes on in these institutions!
For too long these complaints about shabby and poor services of the New Amsterdam Hospital have been made to continue—unabated without cessation! The Dental Clinic must be made to operate on a more efficient manner. If not, the services should be decentralised to the numerous health clinics around the place, so that people won’t have to be waiting months just to do a filling. Why is the government spending so much money on healthcare then, if this is the experience citizens have to go through? It just does not match. Something is wrong here. The hospital did not even have the courtesy, like any efficient institution, to telephone its patients, a day or so before, and do the decent and right thing to say not to visit since they don’t have a dental chair to do work (as ridiculous as that sounds).
I am expecting responses from left, right and centre.
Sincerely,
Leon Suseran
