Home Affairs Minister Discusses Incident at S.I.C.H.

The unfortunate incident that occurred at the San Ignacio Community Hospital earlier this month made headlines earlier this week when it was revealed that a group of persons stormed the facility where David Galindo was receiving emergency medical treatment.  Galindo was shot on the night of June first in Santa Elena Town and he was transported to the hospital in San Ignacio.  While there, his family and friends showed up and reportedly made threats to the medical team attending to the wounded man.  The incident raised the ire of Cabinet and, earlier today, Minister of Home Affairs Kareem Musa weighed in on the matter.

 

Kareem Musa, Minister of Home Affairs

“I have heard two different accounts of that.  There is a police version which they are saying that there was another stabbing that had taken place which they had to respond to, and there is the medical professional’s version whereby they were saying that the gang members were banging on the police officers’ vehicle.  Now, even if you take into account those two scenarios, I don’t think that it could necessarily be said that they expected, meaning the police officers expected that these individuals would have been so brazen as to try to take over the hospital because that is, in effect, what they tried to do, from the account of the medical professionals.  And so, I can’t say that the police officers knew that was going to happen, and if they knew then that would have been negligence on their part.  They saw the individuals aggressing doctors, aggressing nurses, then they ought to have stepped in.  Absolutely, when this incident occurred, I believe there was only one report that was made, damage to property.  Right away, the following day, the individual was charged, taken to the magistrate and fined, as far as I am aware, fifteen hundred dollars.  There was no other reports of threats issued to the medical officers and so when that news broke many days later, it wasn’t as though the doctors and nurses had complained to the police that something had happened and the police did not respond.  At least that is my understanding of the situation and so when it came to light that instead of going to police, they went to Channel 7 to provide this information, obviously the police had to take very swift action.  Cabinet took swift action because this is absolutely out of order for a situation like that to have occurred at a public hospital.  Hence the reason Cabinet has issued a very strong condemnation and strong action of going after these individuals and oftentimes we are working out a protocol with the San Ignacio Hospital and then I mentioned to the ComPol that we can’t wait for it to happen again at another hospital and so while it is we are establishing protocol for this one, we might as well try to replicate a similar protocol for all hospitals because it’s completely out of order and we cannot have an incident like this happen again.”