I want to start this post by saying that I have nothing against the medical staff who we met while in Fiji. I am amount to complain a lot, but I feel like they did the best with what they have, and they definitely saved a life.
While we were away, we had a medical emergency which required hospitalisation. We ended up in Nadi Hospital and right away we were struck at the difference. While you can barely walk 10 metres in a hospital in Melbourne without seeing one of those hand sanitiser dispensers, I think we barely saw one there. Patient hygiene didn't seem to be a priority, and it's probably a case of them being understaffed and underfunded. We had to ask to get clean sheets, and ended up changing them ourselves. When the meal arrived, there was no cutlery. When we asked for some cutlery, one of the nurses grabbed a used plastic spork from another patient and gave it to us.
Some of the other things that made us unsettled.
There was a stray cat that was wandering around and went into the pantry (where all the patient meals are kept). We chased it out and closed the door, and the cat hung around outside the door as though it knew what was inside, meaning it had been in there before.
The nurse call button was broken. You can't call the nurse, but if you are able to press the cancel button!
There were holes on the walls all over the place. On our last day, we saw a cockroach nestled in the sheets.
The toilets didn't have toilet paper in them. When we first discovered this, one of the nurses was very kind and gave us some from her personal supply. We quickly learned to bring our own. There was no hot water in the showers, the sink in the toilet didn't have soap.
The above pictured heart rate monitor was shared between all the patients in the hospital, and wasn't quite accurate because one of the cables was missing.
Needless to say, when our travel insurance company said they were going to organise a medical evacuation, we took them up at the first opportunity.
GET TRAVEL INSURANCE!
(Not that I want to blatantly promote them, but Allianz was great. It was a bit frustrating going through all those phone menu options, as we kept running out of phone credit, but once we managed to get through to someone and gave them a number to call us back on, everything went really smoothly.)
As I mentioned at the start, the staff were amazing, and they really were doing the best with what they had. One of the doctors was managing sixteen patients at the same time, and you have to marvel at their ability to context switch like that. Though it also makes you wonder how many people who would have survived if they had access to better healthcare.
Earlier in the year, I wrote about how if I suddenly had $100 million, I'd open a little café and do nice things for the patrons. After seeing the vast chasm in the difference of healthcare between Melbourne and Nadi, it really makes me sad that there are probably people out there who should have lived, if only they didn't have the misfortune of living where they do, and so my little café seems like such a stupid thing to aspire to in comparison. Once we did return to Melbourne, the doctors pretty much told us that if we had waited another day, we'd probably be looking at caskets right now. The Nadi hospital didn't have the diagnostic tools required to work out exactly what the issue was (which is what prompted the medical evacuation in the first place).
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