Men and women share the restrooms at the HCMC Tumor Hospital in Binh Thanh District last Friday.

Most hospital patients in Ho Chi Minh City only use the toilets when they can bear it no longer.

The stench, the filth and the crowding have to be experienced to be believed, and there’s no privacy as all the bolts on the toilet doors are busted.

And it’s no use looking for maintenance crews as there aren’t any.

On the ground floor of Saigon General Hospital in District 1, there are three restrooms for women but no working toilets or toilet-paper bins at all, and one of the restrooms is always flooded.

In District 5, the stench emanating from the toilets at the HCMC Trauma and Orthopedics Hospital hits the nose from far away.

A score of patients up for microsurgery, not to mention their caretakers, have to share one toilet that doesn’t flush and whose door can no longer be locked.

Anytime she has to use the toilet, “it’s like being tortured,” exclaimed Lien, a relative of a patient in the [microsurgery] ward.

“It makes my head hurt.”

Thoa, the mother of a patient in the same ward, said the toilet was “terrible” but people had to line up for it anyway. She said anyone using it had to hold their nose.

The miserable mom should know all about it as she’s been there helping her daughter for a month now.

At the Tumor Hospital in Binh Thanh District, some of the restrooms are closed for repair so men and women have to share the remaining five. Unsurprisingly, all the door locks are broken there too.

It takes more than 15 minutes after joining the line to get into the toilet stall. Some people simply cannot hold on that long and relieve themselves right outside their room.

A man identified only as PTN, coming for a check-up at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in District 5, said, “It takes as long to your toilet turn as it does to your examination turn.”

The hospital handles more than 1,000 outpatients every day, yet all they have to answer the call of nature are a couple of restrooms where the toilet-paper bins are full to overflowing and the toilets are left unflushed.

There’s no “gents” or “ladies” sign and that makes Huong, who goes to the hospital regularly for a check-up, feel “uncomfortable.”

“I just try to hold it in,” she said.

It’s a similar story at An Binh Hospital in District 5, where used toilet paper lies scattered on the floor of the two common restrooms in the outpatients department, and the toilet doors have no locks.

The people who hold the concession to the restrooms charge VND1,000 (5 US cents) each time, double the amount stated in their contract with the hospital.

An Binh is one of the few hospitals in HCMC with a separate toilet in every sick room.

The hospital is supposed to be a model for hospital restrooms, yet those it has are squalid and decrepit. To add insult to injury, the taps are broken so water flows everywhere.

Clean water is also wasted in the restrooms of Saigon General Hospital and the Trauma and Orthopedic Hospital as the taps cannot be turned off and the toilet cisterns don’t work properly.

“It’s a big waste to let water flow like that, but the hospital doesn’t bother to fix it,” said Nguyen Van Phong, who is taking care of a relative at Saigon General Hospital.

Phong has taken matters into his own hands and repaired one of the cisterns on his own several times.

At the Central Maternity Hospital in Hanoi, the restroom floors are so wet and filthy that people slip and fall.

Nobody’s business

Nguyen Van Xuyen, director of Saigon General Hospital, is aware of the situation and usually orders any damage to be fixed quickly. Unfortunately, the toilets break again soon after.

Only when he checks himself is everything put back in order, he said.

“The toilets seem to be the business of nobody.”

Nguyen Dinh Chanh, director of An Binh Hospital, said the hospital was “very concerned about its restrooms.”

But when asked about the faulty toilets, Chanh said he had no idea because he didn’t use those restrooms, and blamed the cleaners for failing to report problems.

He admitted that outsiders often broke into the hospital and stole water taps or toilet parts to sell to scrap merchants.

Chanh also mentioned the heroin addicts who shoot up in the hospital’s restrooms as there is no one to guard the rooms.

Tran Thanh My, director of the Trauma and Orthopedic Hospital, said the hospital was confined and narrow so “it’s good enough that we have those restrooms.”

The director was referring to the private toilets that some of the sickrooms have.

He failed to comment on the general toilets, but his subordinate Do Trong Thuy did concede that the common restrooms were not up to scratch.

Director Le Hoang Minh of the Tumor Hospital said the restrooms in his department were very old and could not handle the increasing number of outpatients, which has reached 1,600 a day.

Source: Tuoi Tre