Diabetic amputations ‘depressing’

FIJI – A doctor in Fiji says the large number of amputations that have to be undertaken because of diabetes is depressing.

The Foundation of Rural Integrated Enterprises and Development’s Doctor Jone Hawea says the age of those who need limbs removed is getting younger.

He says Fiji’s surgeon’s undertake around 700 amputations a year.

“We know for a fact about 700 amputations a year. We are amputating people as young as 30 to 40 years old.

“Most of my patients who I have amputated didn’t find out that they had diabetes until they presented with a foot lesian, which is already rotten and that’s when they find out they have diabetes.”

Dr Hawea says intervention is needed to stop so many people having amputations.

“I’d like to see more programmes that work in context of our local people.

“I would like to see a utilization of this ethnicity traditional structures. Make use of the churches and cultural structures that already exist, and have a lot of power to drive people one way or another in terms of changing their behaviour.

“I would like to see programmes that use these more. And also on a national scale our leaders have been shouting that diabetes is a crisis especially amputation is a crisis, everyone is saying that it’s a crisis but it’s not reflective in our budgets and what’s coming out on a national level on a policy scale.

“It a depressing environment to be working in, to see your own people especially when you follow them up in the clinics and they come back and they tell you their wives or their husbands have run away because they couldn’t take the load.

“It gets to us. I feel almost depressed and the surgical department we are just at the receiving end of all these problems. We are at the bottom of a cliff.

“We are not controlling the amount of people coming in, and day in and day out we now have a dedicated operating theatre just for the surgical management of diabetic foot infections, and so it is a depressing environment.” - RNZI