Children’s Ward In Vietnam

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32301, 20 May 1970, Page 2

Children’s Ward In Vietnam

The new children’s ward to be built by the Sir Walter Nash Memorial Appeal Committee at Qui Nhon Hospital in Vietnam will provide 64 beds. To provide the new wing, New Zealanders are being asked to raise $lOO,OOO. And though simple and inexpensive by New Zealand standards, the building has been designed for the utmost efficiency for conditions at the hospital, even to supplying basins for relatives in which to wash patients’ clothes. At present there are 465 beds in the hospital, some of them on the floor. Many are used for two or more patients at a time.

To add to the congestion, one or more members of a patient’s family move into the hospital also and stay by the bedside, sleeping on the floor or camping outside the building. Relatives Help

The relatives keep watch over the patients and care for them by bringing food and water, if necessary. They are usually able to tell doctors and nurses whether the patient is responding to treatment.

Of the hundreds of patients who pass through the hospital every year, an increasing number are victims of road accidents, many of them children.

Patients are also admitted suffering from burns, war wounds and diseases which are common in a country with little public knowledge of health and hygiene. Staff Shortage

The new wing will not answer all the problems of the hospital. There is a desperate shortage of qualified staff. Each New Zealand nurse in the hospital team is in charge of a ward, assisted by Vietnamese nurses, and New Zealand technicians have to train their own assistants to do the work.

There is a shortage of supplies such as linen, drugs, oxygen and blood. Even water is rationed. Equipment, though not inefficient, is inadequate to cope with the huge amount of work and would be considered out of date in New Zealand.

A New Zealand surgical team of 14 has been in Vietnam since 1963. Working hours are long and the head of the team, Dr J. Enright, of Auckland, and the physician, Dr Margaret Neave, of Wellington, are at the hospital until late every night

A New Zealand visitor who recently saw the hospital said that on old part of it, which accommodated tuberculosis patients and those recuperating from surgery, had earth floors and rickety walls. The visitor remarked that the building would not be used even as a fowlhouse In New Zealand. These appalling conditions will not be helped by the new wing. But the situation will be improved for children by the erection of the Sir Walter Nash Memorial Ward. It will mean that there will be more space in the hospital for children and that they will receive better treatment for sickness or injury. The photograph shows Nurse Margaret Jenkinson of Epsom, Auckland, putting a plaster on a child’s leg (partly obscured) in a treatment clinic at Qui Nhon Hospital. The child was the victim of a road accident.