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After 100 years, traditional values remain key for St. Carolus Hospital
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span>St. Carolus Hospital celebrates a century of service this year. President director Endrotomo Sumargono said that one thing that distinguished the hospital among all others is its patient-oriented services, nursing being one of its strengths.
He explained that the hospital invested heavily in its nursing department. Of the hospital’s approximately 1,400 employees, 498 are nurses. The hospital also aims to increase the number until it makes up 50 percent of the total.
“I think 50 percent is the ideal composition to optimize the hospital’s services,” he told The Jakarta Post in an exclusive interview on Thursday, adding that to reach it the hospital also relied on the St. Carolus Institute of Health Sciences, from which many of the hospital’s nurses graduated.
The first Catholic hospital in the city was officially opened on Jan. 21, 1919, during the Dutch colonial period, when it was run by 10 nuns from the Netherlands and had only 40 beds.
The need for the hospital was seen by several Catholic figures in 1910. It prompted them to communicate with the Sisters of St. Carolus Borromaeus in Maastricht in the Netherlands. A year before it was opened, the order began sending nuns to Jakarta, then called Batavia.
The juxtaposition of the hospital’s core values and the wide range of health services it offers today are mirrored in how St. Carolus’ original classic colonial edifice now stands side by side with a new building that was inaugurated last year.
The new eight-story structure, named the Carolus Borromeus Medical Building, houses all the polyclinics, executive rooms for VIP patients, a nursing unit, auditorium and basement floors for extra parking.
Amid tough competition with other private hospitals, Endrotomo said the hospital worked hard to keep the business going. As St. Carolus serves patients from various walks of life, he admitted that it is quite a challenge since they should also maintain quality.
Without being too open about the hospital business, Endrotomo claimed that the number of patients under the National Health Insurance (JKN) scheme run by Health Care and Social Security Agency (BPJS Kesehatan) makes 40 percent of its total patients.
He said that it was one of the hospital’s ways to ensure its services are nondiscriminatory.
“We want to be ‘the option for the poor’. We serve them in the same room as the regular ones. We used to separate patients under social protection from the regular patients, but we no longer do that,” he said.
“And I believe that it’s always been the core value that our founding sisters [the nuns from the Netherlands] wanted us to keep,” he said.
“We want to be ‘the option for the poor’. We serve them in the same room as the regular patients.”
Endrotomo said nowadays there were only a few workers at the hospital who were also nuns as most employees in management and the medical services were professional healthcare workers.
Among the few nuns is Sister Engel. She has been one of the Sisters of Carolus Borromaeus for 23 years and has served in the St. Carolus Hospital for three years. She is the director of the hospital’s nursing unit and lives in a convent within the hospital area.
“In Catholicism, we see the patients as the guests of God and we, the nurses and nuns, are the hosts who should serve them. This is our social and spiritual calling,” the 48-year-old said.
Not all of Engel’s subordinates are Catholic, so she always suggests that her nurses from other religions adopt the St. Carolus Hospital’s values through their own beliefs.
The St. Carolus Hospital now has several superior services, namely the St. Carolus Bone and Joint Center, Maternity and Child Care, the Uro-Nephrology Center, the Digestive Center and the Pain Clinic. Its emergency department is ready to treat various urgent illnesses and injuries, from cardiac arrest, obstetric and gynecological ailments, to injuries caused by accidents or disasters.
The hospital also offers pastoral care that provides spiritual assistance and counseling to Catholic patients and their families.
As Sister Engel said: “We want to be part of our patient’s life journey, from the time they are inside their mother’s womb, until they grow up and become old and even until their last breath.”
Among the regular patients was 83-year-old Maria, who had just completed a medical check-up that afternoon. She was accompanied by her husband, Chandra, and a personal caregiver.
“Today is my wife’s turn [for getting a check-up]; next month is mine,” Chandra said.
The couple have been frequent patients in St. Carolus Hospital since they were young. Knowing that the hospital has just celebrated its centenary, Chandra said he wished it would serve the public for more centuries to come.
