VIEWPOINT: Maui Memorial staff does the best it can with what it has to work with

By JAN SHIELDS

In response to James Krueger’s Oct. 28 Viewpoint, I stand by the facts. Many of my Association for Improved Healthcare on Maui members are also Maui Memorial Medical Center employees, and they agree with my facts.

Mr. Krueger was the first person to alert me to the poor quality of medicine being provided by MMMC. He asked me to testify as an expert witness in a wrongful death lawsuit involving a baby who had died at MMMC. He told me to name my price. He was correct in the lawsuit. The baby would not have died if MMMC had a neonatal intensive care unit.

However, I would never testify against the good doctors and good nurses at MMMC. They are the true victims in this situation. They do the best that they can do under the circumstances in which they are expected to work.

The MMMC staff does not have the equipment, products, specialized training or medical specialists that are needed for them to perform their work properly. Then, when they fail, they are further victimized with lawsuits. The staff at MMMC gets it from all angles. The Hawaii Health System Corp. should have been sued for not providing what we need.

I think tort reform in Hawaii, along with new private hospitals on Maui, would solve our doctor shortage.

A civilized society does not let its babies die. Perhaps the Maui Healthcare Initiative Taskforce will think saving our Maui babies’ lives is important. Oahu thinks saving their babies’ lives is important. They have four NICUs.

In my Oct. 19 letter, I wrote: “The rest of the radiology services (imaging) at Maui Memorial are not improved, including the old two-slice CT scanner. It can miss a tumor. This scanner should be at least 64 slice.”

Mr. Krueger’s answer: “Maui Memorial’s MRI scanner is as good as anything anywhere in the 1.5 tesla range, and is considered the national standard for neurologic and body imaging.”

That is like me saying, “Your pit bull bites” and Mr. Krueger answering, “My parrot is a good bird.”

CT scans use an X-ray-generating device that rotates around your body and a very powerful computer to create cross-sectional images, like slices of the inside of your body. Magnetic-resonance imaging is a technique that uses a magnetic field and radio waves to create cross-sectional images of your head and body.

I recently heard from a Maui Memorial doctor that the old two-slice CT scanner is still in place and MMMC hasn’t even ordered the new 64-slice machine yet. MMMC states that we are going to get a 16 to 32 CT machine. Is the 16 to 32 an old discarded machine from an Oahu hospital? Why isn’t MMMC getting the 64-slice CT? The CT scanner is useful for the whole body, not just the heart. Our Maui doctors don’t do cardiac surgery but still need to diagnose cardiac problems.

As a patient advocate, which is what all nurses are, I suggest that you go to Oahu for your CT scans.

Mr. Krueger disagrees with Dr. David Tong, an expert from San Francisco, who advises MMMC to have a vascular neurologist run the hospital’s stroke service. I think that is fabulous advice. It will be very difficult to get a specialist of that level to work in a government hospital. Perhaps we could move the whole stroke department into a new private hospital where it would be much easier to get staff at that level of expertise.

Our Maui doctors and nurses deserve a better place to work with the equipment, products and facilities that they need to do their jobs. Why do our Maui nurses make $10 an hour less than Oahu nurses?

Our Maui people deserve private hospitals just like Oahu people have. Why do we have to sacrifice our Maui health and lives to keep the Oahu hospitals, which are big money-making corporations, in business?

Readers, join the Association for Improved Healthcare on Maui at www.AIHM-Maui.org. MMMC employees, you are more than welcome to join also. Your co-workers are joining, and we don’t share our AIHM membership names with anyone, ever. Together, we will get the healthcare system that the good people of Maui deserve.

Jan Shields is a neonatal intensive care nurse. She founded the Association for Improved Healthcare on Maui along with Jim Foster. She is a patient advocate.