In 1976, Dr Andrew Argent walked into the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital for the first time as a fifth-year medical student. He was blown away. “It was a unique hospital with an amazing range of patients and people. The staff were remarkably attuned to teaching and had developed a whole culture of treating patients really well as people and as communities.” Although it was overwhelming at first, the young doctor soon came to treasure the environment.
The Hospital provided tea and lunch for staff in those days, and afterwards, the doctors would gather around and drink coffee together. “It was pretty terrible coffee,” Dr Argent laughs, “But everyone was there.” As different specialties gathered each day in the doctors’ bungalow, they could ask questions and learn from each other. The nurses, too, were invaluable sources of wisdom. By the late 1970s, many of them had been working at the Hospital for decades and were always willing to share what they had gleaned from their experience.
In the early 1980s, a newly qualified Dr Argent returned to the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital as a senior house officer. There were only four of them at the time, and when one contracted chickenpox, the other three were left to work gruelling hours. Still, those years left a deep impression on him.
“I can still remember some of the patients I treated in Ward B2 at the beginning of 1980. It was a young lady by the name of Karen who was there with rheumatic carditis, and I can remember she was in the cubicle just second from the end of B2.” She was older than many of the other children in the ward at the time, and the younger ones loved to scramble onto her bed and spend time with her. “She was running ‘Karen se crèche’.” Dr Argent chuckles. “There were all sorts of personalities, and I remember being part of it.
In the late 1980s, as he completed his specialist training, Dr Argent began his new role as a senior resident in paediatric pulmonology. Things were vastly different. The intensive care unit was just a few designated beds in a ward, and there were no modern ventilators.
At the other end of the same ward, there were the children with tracheostomies. “They were complete hooligans,” Dr Argent laughs. “They had been in hospital for months, if not years. They hadn’t been socialised or been home at all.” Soon after, Dr Argent witnessed the establishment of the groundbreaking Breatheasy Programme, which trained mothers to care for their children’s tracheostomies and allowed them to go home to their families.
The Hospital, too, grew tremendously over Dr Argent’s career. He watched as the Hospital teetered on the brink of closure. It desperately needed new facilities and equipment, but the available funding was already stretched thin. Then, in 1994, he saw the establishment of the Children’s Hospital Trust that constructed entirely new facilities and purchased much-needed equipment. The Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital was, once again, at the cutting edge of medicine in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“What exists today stands on the shoulders of the tens and hundreds of people who have absolutely refused to let financial constraints, political problems, or challenges interfere with the process of saying we have to get the best possible care for children. There’s always been this sense of being committed to the community, fighting for the rights of children. And as the hospital goes into its 70th year, that is the result of all that passion and determination over so many years. And I can only hope that that continues into the future and the Hospital remains deeply committed to the community it serves.”
