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| Sunday, 13 February 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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The importance of Mahamodera hospital Mahamodera hospital was the General Hospital in Galle, till the hospital at Karapitiya was opened in the early 1980s. Even in 1962, when I was an intern in General Hospital Galle, the need to move the hospital far away from the sea was a topic of discussion. This resulted in new buildings being added to the hospital. In 1975, Dr. Joe Fernando the Superintendent of Health Services and I were involved in finding a suitable site to shift, Galle Hospital. It was Mr. George Rajapakse, Minister of Health who selected the site at Karapitiya, though we told him that the terrain was not suitable. The plan was to build a 1000 bed General Hospital. It was not planned to be a Teaching Hospital. The decision to open a medical faculty was made later. The hospital was not big enough to house the existing facilities at Mahamodera and the clinical departments of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ruhuna. Therefore, the move from Mahamodera to Karapitiya was never completed. Obstetrics and Gynaecology remained in Mahamodera. However the Ministry of Health's objective was to move these units also and hand over the buildings to other government departments. This move of completely abandoning Mahamodera was opposedd by the then Galle Hospital Committee. I also wrote a letter to the newspapers saying that Galle needed two large hospitals in the same way as Kandy/Peradeniya. The Ministry of Teaching Hospitals was set up in 1984. At that time we decided that Mahamodera Hospital would not be closed. We decided that Obstetrics and Gynaecology would remain there with a small OPD. We made that decision because there was no space in Karapitiya to put up an additional building complex to house Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The other factor was that management-wise the maximum size of a hospital was though to be 800 to 1000 beds. It would have been more appropriate to move the Nurses Training School from Mahamodera to Karapitiya. This was because there was a need to transport pupil nurses daily from Mahamodera to Karapitiya. The land originally earmarked for a Nurses Training School in Karapitiya had been utilised for something else. We renovated the Mahamodera Hospital which had been neglected for many years. We made it more suitable for the clinical work of the departments of obstetrics and gynaecology of the Health Department and the University. Even after the Ministry of Teaching Hospital was terminated in 1989, and the hospitals at Galle were taken over by the Ministry of Health, this policy was not changed. At the time of the tsunami the Mahamodera Hospital had 400 beds in the obstetrics and gynaecology ward. The facilities for delivery, operations, intensive care, neonatal care were adequate. The tsunami basically broke the boundary walls and damaged the ground floors of the buildings which is at a lower elevation. The important unit that was very badly damaged was the blood bank. The operating theatres, laboratory and X ray facilities were intact. The patients were moved to Karapitiya as an emergency measure. At Karapitiya 80 beds from the Neurology, Dental and Dermatology units were commissioned to house the patients from Mahamodera. Later the OPD was also opened for patients. This provided 30 beds. The facilities for delivery are poor. It was a corner of a ward. Now it is a room in the OPD. There is severe overcrowding. Mothers are suffering. The decision of the Ministry should have been to shift the wards to Mahamodera as soon as possible once the infrastructure facilities were reinstated. Unfortunately other ideas were mooted. The idea was to build new buildings near the Karapitiya Hospital for these patients. There was news that land was found and that a donor was available. The idea was to manage the patients with the facilities found in Karapitiya plus a 'tent hospital' which can accommodate 50 patients, till the proposed new buildings are completed. - Dr. Lucian Jayasuriya |
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