CREATIVE SPACE #11 OF 2023 (Uploaded May 23rd 2023)
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CREATIVE SPACE is an award-winning series spotlighting local (Antiguan and Barbudan/Caribbean) art and culture. As a brand, it dates back to 2009, published exclusively in LIAT’s inflight magazine. It was revamped in 2018 as a blog series and syndicated as of 2019 on Antiguanice.com. Its publishing partner, as of 2020, is the Daily Observer newspaper. It has its first print run in the paper every other Wednesday, with the online extended edition with EXTRAS running here on the blog and full interviews and extras on @Jhohadli on YouTube. In 2021, the two–part CREATIVE SPACE mini-series on marine culture placed third in the OECS clean oceans journalists challenge. CREATIVE SPACE is created, owned, and written by Joanne C. Hillhouse – Antiguan-Barbudan/Caribbean author, journalist, producer, and freelance writer, editor, and trainer.
Here’s a link to the issue as it appeared in the Daily OHere’s a link to the issue as it appeared in the Daily Observer newspaper on May 24th 2023:
Below is the extended online edition (not a duplicate of the edition with publishing partner Observer Media) with EXTRAS.
CREATIVE SPACE #11 OF 2023 – DOES OUR PUBLIC HEALTH HAVE A CULTURE OF CARE?
The clinic she regularly walks to closed unceremoniously. The alternative clinic is in the wrong direction (even more so than the clinic she regularly walks to), not in walking distance nor on her bus route. The geography never made sense but maybe now she can go to the clinic on her route? The Ministry advises that she can. But when she does, the staff says she can’t because her file isn’t there. No, the files can’t be transferred electronically.
Several phone calls and emails belabouring the logistical inconvenience, especially for people without transportation, later, she eventually (because there is no other way) finds herself at the alternative clinic. She borrowed a car for the excursion and finds it only after circling and asking directions and circling some more and asking directions some more – eventually stumbling upon it down a road off the village’s main road.
At a door by the gallery, a staffer sits. She tells the staffer she is there to see the doctor. The staffer responds, how old are you? No request for her name nor the card which would have all relevant information. She is flummoxed. Her instinctive “why” is inevitably deemed non-responsive and she realizes that as with every encounter with the bureaucracy, compliance not questions is required. When she eventually complies, someone else on the gallery promptly comments on her response – which seemed inevitable given the lack of privacy or discretion. Her name is not requested and it is many long minutes later, as she sits waiting in the crowded area where staff is doing in-take, where people are waiting and coming and going while she waits, and where someone is conducting a mental health seminar, that a Security advises her to return to the staffer who had taken her age at the door by the gallery and give her name. She does so and finally her card is taken and she is on the list. Ironically, though she was sent there because the clinic on her route didn’t have her file, it turns out this clinic doesn’t either.
Months later, the clinic she usually walks to is still closed, and as she needs to make another visit, she is hoping that the promise at the alternative clinic to transfer her file to the clinic on her route has gone off without a glitch… glitch, glitch, glitch. She is told that there are now arrangements to bus people from the closed clinic to another country clinic. She tries to explain that back when she put in her request, there was no such facilitation and is checking to see if her transfer went through. The response is oddly confrontational, they “work here and know what arrangements have been made” followed by an “I’ll get the supervisor”, and, as she turns to wait, laughter. When she turns back to inquire about the laughter, stares, a cut eye, a choops, and an “I’m on my phone…miss”.
In between these two clinic visits, there is a trip to the ER which she leaves after waiting five to six hours, only to have to return in half an hour. The security remembers her and tries to help, but she has lost her place. By the time she leaves with a prescription, it’s so late all the pharmacies are closed, and she walks to the bus station, hoping to catch a bus home.
Someone she knows has applied for their medical records and after various fruitless follow-ups was directed to the clinic – the same clinic to which she had months ago requested a transfer. The person had put in a request for the files, without reply. When they inquired further, they were told there is no record of their files nor of them applying for said files. The person telling her this said their questioning was met with anger and what they described as unprofessionalism: “I didn’t know that’s the way they operate.”
Why am I writing this? Who cares about one person’s – well, two…no, three – people’s experiences. Because one is too many and there are many more stories, whether through lack of customer relationship training or just professionalism, of this lack of care …is that okay?
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EXTRAS
I’ve got nothing to add to these ripped from real life stories of experiences with public health in Antigua and Barbuda. Writing is how I process life, so I found myself writing these experiences, evan as I questioned if there was value in sharing publicly what could read like a rant. But I am a storyteller, so I approached it as a storytelling exercise. I shared an earlier draft with someone who felt that there was value in sharing it publicly because everyone that seeks health care is a person, a person at their most vulnerable at that, and should be treated as such. In editing roughly 1,000 words from the second draft, that’s what I tried to keep in mind – the people, the culture, the need to do better.
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