The Tribune

By NICO SCAVELLA

Tribune Staff Reporter

nscavella@tribunemedia.net

FORMER FNM Senator Dr Duane Sands said yesterday that were it not for “skilled” nurses and doctors at the Princess Margaret Hospital the murder count for the year “would be 200 by now”.

The leading surgeon added that patients seeking standard care from PMH have been somewhat marginalised as officials are pressured to prioritise trauma victims. However, he said, such a reality is “part of the normal flow of things at the Princess Margaret Hospital”.

Dr Sands’ statements came a day after the country recorded its seventh homicide in five days and the fifth in New Providence. Up to press time, the murder count stood at 107 for the year.

Yesterday, however, Dr Sands suggested that the country’s murder count does not display the true “severity of the problem”.

“When you see an increase in violent crime as we have been seeing, understand that when you have 100 murders by shooting, you probably have had 300, 350 shootings,” Dr Sands said. “Most of those patients, more than 90 per cent of those patients end up in the operating room, some of them go to the Intensive Care Unit. They consume huge amount of resources. But the public rarely hears about, or is concerned about the people that get shot, but survive.

“We are focused primarily on the murders. And so I believe we are underestimating or lulled into a false sense of security as to the severity of the problem. The problem is a lot worse than the murder count. And so if you didn’t have surgeons, neurosurgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, emergency room doctors who are skilled in the management of trauma, our murder count would be 200 by now.

“That is the real deal. We are in the middle of an ongoing national crime crisis. And it ought not be business as usual.”

He said the escalating crime situation creates more traffic in the Accident and Emergency (A&E) section of the hospital, which usually means that persons seeking “standard” care are often put aside.

“For many years now this had made it difficult to do much else other than provide care for emergency patients,” he said. “Certainly in orthopedics, they do very little non-trauma orthopaedics. The surgical wards find that a significant amount of their time is consumed with care of patients of violent crimes, but that is the norm.

“When you add to that stabbings, motor vehicle collisions etc, it means that our focus is primarily on dealing with those things, because you don’t have the option of setting them aside. So cancer care gets delayed. Management of other surgical problems gets delayed. That is the reality of life in the Bahamas.”

Dr Sands also accused the government of paying “lip service” to the management of the country’s crime situation.

“They said that Urban Renewal 2.0 was going to work. They said that their anti-crime strategies, which would reflect good governance, were going to work. And now that it is clearly not working, now that the commissioner of police has taken to Twitter and social media to say that we have a problem, it is now time for the minister of national security and the prime minister to address the people of the Bahamas and convene a dramatically altered approach to crime.”