WESTERN BUREAU — Donald Walker is a bitter man. Not only has he lost his 13 year-old son, Oshane, to leukaemia, but he’s convinced that nurses at the Cornwall Regional Hospital did not do enough to help the Montego Bay teen.

According to Walker, a 37 year-old welder and auto body repair man, Oshane fell on three occasions in the hospital after he was diagnosed with leukaemia in October last year. The nurses, he said, could have helped prevent the falls.

“Mi nuh seh the doctor nuh try him best, but the nurse them don’t do anything,” Walker complained to the Observer last week.

Oshane’s first fall, the distraught father said, occurred while the teen was making his way to the restroom on the night of December 15 last year.

After the fall, Walker said, a brain scan was done and revealed internal bleeding in the boy’s brain. He charged that despite the presence of nurses on the ward, Oshane fell from his bed on two other occasions in the months leading up to his death on June 8.

“The second time he fell, another bump come up on the head and he never stop bleed until he died,” Walker told the Observer. “He was bleeding from his nose, and blood coming out the mouth. A couple days before him died, some big clods of blood just coming through his nose sometime, and yuh have to hold one of his nostrils and ask him to blow. When him blow is just some big piece of blood like liver or so.”

Walker’s anger at the nurses is rooted in his belief that they basically neglected the boy, particularly after he (Walker) publicised the story on Perkins on Line, the popular day time radio talk show, following the child’s first fall.

“If the doctor come and give him those kinds of medication weh mek him drowsy, I think the nurse duty should be to see to it that him nuh come off the bed, and if him need something them can assist,” Walker said.

But the Montego Bay-based hospital’s CEO, Everton Anderson, is denying Walker’s charge of negligence, though he admits that some aspects of the hospital’s operational procedures need tightening.

“I wouldn’t say we deny it totally, but we have not seen any evidence of any such negligence,” said Anderson, who also told the Observer that hospital officials met with Walker last Wednesday.

“Negligence is a very strong word, because negligence sometimes implies that one would have done something totally off-key and that is not in line with good practices,” he said. “And I would say that based on the meeting (Wednesday) there are some aspects of our care that we have to look into, but on the whole we were pretty satisfied with the level of care offered and the attitude the staff had to the child. In fact, the nurses said they went overboard in many instances to accommodate the child.”

Walker, though, is adamant that his complaint is legitimate and said he intends to have an independent pathologist at Oshane’s autopsy. No date has so far been set for the examination.

“What me need from the hospital now is a fair post-mortem to be done to find out if him die from the leukaemia or if him die from the falls. That’s what mi need to know,” Walker said.

“I have to have an independent pathologist to observe. And even if he didn’t die from those injuries, them still have an effect on his death. To the sickness that he had, he shouldn’t fall and hit him head; and not one time, but more than once. So even if them don’t find anything wrong, mi still haffi deal with the negligence of the hospital, whatever happens,” he added.

A part of that negligence, Walker charged, manifested itself in the general conditions at the hospital.

“Even the bed he was on, him keep complaining that there was a bump under him back burning him. And when I lift it up, the leather roll up like a vein. I had to get a complete bed sponge fi go over it and wrap it so him could have a comfortable bed,” Walker said.

“Everything just down the drain and mi nuh see the service… Not even sheet is there fi change… If I don’t go there and change the bedding nuff a de times, it don’t change.”

He said that he and his son’s mother had to ensure that they visited Oshane mornings and evenings. “If yu nuh go there in the morning when yu go (in the evening) yu can see blood and spit all over him,” he added with tears in his eyes.

But Anderson, while obviously sympathetic to Walker’s grief, said there were other issues to be taken into consideration.

“The nurse-to-patient ratio is not what we want it to be, neither here in Jamaica nor anywhere in the world,” he told the Observer. “So it is going to be totally impossible to watch the child 24 hours a day… It came up (in the meeting on Wednesday) that one of the times the child fell, the nurse was actually very near. Apparently the child was stretching to reach for something so they really don’t understand. It is very, very complicated…” the CEO said.

“But under the circumstances, I think they did very well. And what you have to understand too is when you get an adolescent in hospital it’s totally different from treating an adult because while an adult will lie in bed and follow instructions, a child might not be willing to do that at all,” Anderson added.

As to whether the falls contributed to the child’s death, Anderson said the hospital would await the post-mortem result, adding that he was amazed at Walker’s continued complaints, even after last Wednesday’s meeting.

“Generally I am pleased with what I have seen and we will await whatever outcome,” Anderson said. “I am flabbergasted that he is still complaining. We met for three hours yesterday (Wednesday)…”

Oshane would have celebrated his 14th birthday this August. He was the second of his father’s four children who range in age from seven to 16. At the time of his death, Oshane was a student of the Glendevon Primary and Junior High School in Montego Bay.