Alex actress offers suggestions to mitigate patient treatment
ALEXANDRA – Actress proposes mitigating measures on how hospital can make patient experience less bitter.
After the horror she experienced at Edenvale General Hospital, Alex actress and poet Refilwe Pieterse has made some suggestions on how the experience for women and other patients at the hospital can be made less of a bitter pill to swallow.
Pieterse made the suggestions during an interview with Alex News in which she recounted a two-day-long experience at the hospital which culminated in five minutes of what she termed ‘a living hell in a death chamber’.
Pieterse urged the hospital to provide a trauma room for women who are on the verge of losing their babies or those that have lost them already so they could be offered professional counselling and help to overcome their experiences from a support group.
“Counsellors should also tell you in advance what you are in for at the cleaning chamber where the womb of a woman is cleaned after a miscarriage and how the whole exercise is done. I don’t see why it should be done when a patient is conscious. Patients can be sedated in order to make the five minutes of horror less horrible,” she suggested.
Besides counselling the women, Pieterse said the hospital must seek for assistance from NPO organisations such as the Gift of the Givers to offer patients food, ‘even if it’s just two slices of bread that will make a huge difference between life and death while in the cleaning chamber’.
“Gift of the Givers can also provide bleeding women with sanitary pads, instead of the trails of blood leading in all directions of the hospital as we experienced. The trauma and pads can help stop women from bleeding to death…
“For a woman to lose her baby through a miscarriage is an emotional, physical and psychological scar in her life which needs to healed somehow and the trauma room can play a big role in this,” Pieterse said
