There seems to be no end to the stories of the national public health system failing to deliver quality healthcare to patients who go there for services. The most recent incident involves the death of a 33-year-old woman at the San Fernando General Hospital. She reportedly died after undergoing a C-section at the southern hospital. It is too early to say definitively whether or not the hospital care system was deficient and hence the death of the woman. However, because of what is generally perceived as the almost institutional unprofessional performance of our public health institutions, the assumption could be widespread that the woman's death could have been avoided if the system had performed up to an internationally accepted standard.
Without seeking to do a detailed review of questionable deaths over the last ten years, it is public knowledge they have ranged through patients, many of them children, not being promptly or adequately treated, mothers dying during and after child birth, failure to accurately diagnose diseases and therefore give proper treatment, the unsanitary state of national health institutions, non-functioning equipment, the absence of basic equipment expected of a country as wealthy as Trinidad and Tobago. The comment is made about the relative wealth of T&T for the purpose of pointing out that this is not some backwater country without a capacity to provide its citizens with a high standard of basic healthcare. Moreover, a large percentage of government budgeting over the period has gone into the health system to provide the physical facilities, inclusive of buildings and conditions on the wards of the hospitals and the medications required.
With regard to medical care, the cost of government scholarships, the funding of the medical faculties of the University of the West Indies, the salaries to medical staff have run into hundreds of millions of dollars and yet we receive reports of unprofessional treatment of patients. What is more, this is a country with a long history of exceptional medical professionals, doctors, nurses and researchers who have had outstanding international professional careers. The importance of that is that young medical professionals are not starting from scratch; they have a base, a tradition and examples of professionalism to follow as they strive for excellence. One area of healthcare that has often been called into question is the administration of the public health institutions. But here too there has been quite an amount of government expenditure in producing management experts and, undoubtedly, there will be more in the specialist field of healthcare management.
Perhaps this is an area for renewed discussion and attention by the Government. Here the assumption cannot be that because someone emerges as an excellent doctor or nurse, he or she automatically qualifies to be a health administrator. One result of the questions surrounding the quality of public health services has been the reality of people, who have the wherewithal, going abroad for basic healthcare which any country of the stature of T&T should be able to provide. Fact is that many such people have lost, or indeed never had, confidence in the system.
Then there is the view that citizens wanting to get the best of what is on offer at the hospitals and public health centres must engage in some form of corrupt activity, such as bribing an official. The relatively new Minister of Health must challenge himself to bring resolution to problems of the healthcare system before he leaves office.