OUR HOSPITAL

The Louis Constant Fleming Medical Center is a well equipped jewel of a hospital when one looks at it from the outside.  It has one major problem: it nees twice as many beds than it has.


I have heard remarks about it such as "it has one more bed than than the old hospital", while the population has at least tripled, and "it has more office rooms that bed rooms for patients."


Why is this so? With a population that is expanding exponentialy, both through the island's birth rate and its unchecked immigration influs, it is well known throughout the French republic that something needs to be done. The island cannot continue to HAVE to accept so many outsiders because of the French system, while France does not furnish the means to take care of them, since they are living here off the CAF, while that is not allowed in the Hexagon.


Statistics show that in in 2011 the hospital recorded 881 births. It is easy to imagine how the population will increase each year. In any case, if nobody comes in through immigration, the population will have increased by almost 10 000 people in 10 years.


How is a hospital, built already several years ago, supposed to be able to care for this population? St. Martin is the area with the youngest population if the French republic, 40% of its population being below 25 years. That is almost half of the population!


Then we have family members who are brought in month after month by those who are already here, either because they have no remaining family inb their native countires or because they need special treatment, exactly the thing we are so ill-equipped to provide.


Where it stands right now, the hospital is overflowing on an ordianry day, and before the ambulance takes somebody to the emergency room dozens of questions have to be answered to prove that the household cannot take care of the sick person.


What if the dengue and the chikungunya were contagious instead of infectious and required hospitalization? What if a contagious disease were to break out? What if there were to be a really serious accident on board of one of those cruise ships which flood the island with tousands of people at once?


It would seem as if all we got is a new hospital building, and the old building is still in use for other purposes. Why was that building not kept as an emergency hospital or as a maternity hospital?


why is it that governments have to wait for something to happen and hundreds of people to suffer before they will act?


Those in positions of authority, please hear!!!!!