In her capacity as Chair-in-Office of the Commonwealth, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar offered a message for today's commemoration of Commonwealth Day. In her message "Women as Agents of Change", the Prime Minister took note of the special challenges that women face in the health sector throughout the Commonwealth. "We must also look at revising our healthcare programmes to cater for the varying needs of women, as with men," the Prime Minister noted. "Women in many instances are denied access to prevention, treatment and care in health services, and the time has come for this to come to an end."
According to an ANSA McAL Psychological Research Centre opinion poll on the topic of healthcare in Trinidad and Tobago, the People's Partnership government is doing moderately well on its handling of healthcare. While medical professionals have murmured disapprovingly of the hands-on approach of Minister of Health Therese Baptiste-Cornelis, several poll respondents commended the Minister on her willingness to get down into the nitty gritty of taking responsibility for public healthcare. It would be unfair not to note that Minister Baptiste-Cornelis' predecessor, Jerry Narace, had already been making some inroads into the previously intractable issues crippling the healthcare system during his administration.
Narace certainly made it clear through his efforts as health minister that it was necessary to challenge long held presumptions about public healthcare and to hold doctors and nurses accountable for their actions and responsibilities on the floors of the nation's hospitals. It was also under a PNM administration that crucial drugs were made available freely for the elderly and chronically ill through the Chronic Disease Assistance Programme (CDAP). The challenge facing the current administration and Minister Baptiste-Cornelis specifically is moving beyond the low hanging fruit already plucked by the previous government, and engaging the real challenges involved in creating lasting and positive change in the public health sector. The ANSA McAL poll suggests that the Minister has been holding her own in ensuring that health services continue to improve, at least incrementally.
With 24 per cent of the 509 respondents of the poll offering a good rating and 40 per cent giving a fair rating, the government might be tempted to take the sum of the positive ratings, inclusive of the very minimal four percent that described health care as excellent as endorsement of their efforts. The government would be wiser, however, to take closer note of the sentiments of the 24 per cent of respondents who described the public health service as poor and the eight per cent who characterised the service as extremely poor. Within that group are complaints about a shortage of CDAP drugs, long waits for service, poor conditions in the nation's hospitals and a lack of doctors to meet demand.
Among the initiatives that should take pinnacle position on the Health Minister's agenda is the long promised Oncology Centre at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex at Mt Hope. It's been more than four years since former health minister John Rahael turned the sod on that project and in January, Minister Baptiste-Cornelis announced that Cabinet had approved the commencement of the $150 million project to improve the public health sector capacity to manage cancer. While it is understandable that all appropriate procurement protocols and bidding processes should be honoured in the construction of this building, the Minister should also be mindful of the critical need to improve focused care on life-threatening diseases like cancer. When there are failings in public utilities or in public transport, people are inconvenienced, but when public health falters, people's lives are put at risk.
It's also worth further emphasising that these are often people who have no other medical option to meet their critical needs and a failure in public health for them is often crippling or fatal. By that measure, a dissatisfaction factor of 32 per cent should not be treated as merely unsatisfactory by the Minister of Health, it should trigger a mandate to move forward with even greater enthusiasm and forbearance on the challenging mission to improve the nation's public health systems.