I am a Jamaican working as a physician in the United States. I have also worked in Jamaica as a physician and also at the Bustamante Hospital for Children. I read with some bemusement the complaint from the reader ('An absence of common sense' on December 28) regarding the questions on his visit to the hospital.

I was heartened to note, however, that he did not have cause to complain that the security guards were rude to him and his family and so the backhanded compliment suggests that customer service is not dead in Jamaica.

As to his primary complaint, my take is this. The illness of a child causes great anxiety in any parent and so, any one with good sense will commiserate with him in this, and I wish his child speedy recovery. As to his complaint of being interrogated, well, anyone who has passing familiarity with the state of crime in Jamaica - the shootings of patients in hospital and the theft of infants from hospitals - must congratulate the security guards for their vigilance.

I have worked at hospitals considered the best here in the States - Memorial Sloan Kettering, New York Presbyterian/Cornell, Yale New Haven, National Institute of Health Medical Center - and they all have a security clearance which one may only bypass if one is in an ambulance, presumably too ill to do harm. I have also worked in hospitals in the Bronx and Brooklyn and there, the security procedure is more onerous as befits the peculiar circumstances there - not unlike Jamaica.

We have a peculiar tendency to berate our country as if, because we are Third World, we are third in everything. Truth is, it often comes from those who have benefited from the opportunity to have had subsidised education and the benefit of student loans. I too had such notions but coming and working here have disabused me of these.

Well, those are my thoughts with which you may not agree.

I am, etc.,

O'NEIL GREEN

jenardo@yahoo.ca

Rosedale

New York