Hos­pi­tals are be­com­ing “home” for some—in­clud­ing chil­dren at Car­ni­val time.

Some par­ents de­lib­er­ate­ly dose their chil­dren with Brook­lax lax­a­tive, take them to hos­pi­tals for “di­ar­rhoea” treat­ment and leave them there when they want to fete for Car­ni­val, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said yes­ter­day.

“ ...They in­duce di­ar­rhoea, go to the Ac­ci­dent and Emer­gency unit com­plain­ing of this and you have to keep the child! There’s no law against giv­ing your child a lax­a­tive on Car­ni­val Fri­day, but be­cause this pub­lic health sys­tem is free, it’s abused,” Deyals­ingh told Par­lia­ment.

Re­ply­ing to Op­po­si­tion ques­tions, Deyals­ingh con­firmed that across the health sec­tor there are cur­rent­ly 51 peo­ple who are “long-stay pa­tients.” This in­cludes 18 at the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal. There are none at Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal.

Deyals­ingh said the max­i­mum time-frame a per­son can be treat­ed at a pub­lic hos­pi­tal varies de­pend­ing on a di­ag­no­sis. But he said peo­ple “liv­ing” at hos­pi­tals are left there by their fam­i­lies, “be­cause their fam­i­lies don’t want to take care of them at home.”

“Across the health sys­tem there are 51 long-stay pa­tients. (But) that’s the size of a small pri­vate hos­pi­tal! Do you know of any small pri­vate hos­pi­tal with 51 beds that will con­tin­ue to pro­vide free health care for per­sons?” he asked.

“This doesn’t con­sid­er the pa­tients who stay there. But when we call peo­ple’s chil­dren (telling them) ‘Come col­lect your moth­er, come col­lect your fa­ther,’ they don’t come. I see the MP for Fyz­abad (Dr Lack­ram Bo­doe) nod­ding his head.”

Deyals­ingh added, “What do we do? You leave them there be­cause we can’t throw them in­to the streets! You make some arrange­ments with the So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­istry and if there’s space they can be ac­com­mo­dat­ed.

“But what T&T needs to be told is that Christ­mas and Car­ni­val are when peo­ple take their par­ents to be housed at pub­lic ex­pense in pub­lic hos­pi­tals be­cause they want to go ‘up North’ for Christ­mas.

“And for Car­ni­val, they start to dump their chil­dren on the pub­lic health sys­tem from Car­ni­val Fri­day. They don’t come Car­ni­val Sat­ur­day, Sun­day, Mon­day, Tues­day. But mirac­u­lous­ly they ap­pear to col­lect their chil­dren on Ash Wednes­day. And the tax­pay­er picks up the bill—that’s what this free health sys­tem does.”

On sim­i­lar men­tal health is­sues, Deyals­ingh said, “The way this coun­try has dealt with men­tal health at St Ann’s is cul­tur­al—an ab­solute tragedy.”

He said the St Ann’s Hos­pi­tal is a hold­ing bay “ware­hous­ing” pa­tients. He said the cre­ation of a Men­tal Health di­rec­tor—who’d de­cen­tralise ser­vices—has been ap­proved and “ware­hous­ing” at tax­pay­ers’ ex­pense would end. He said pa­tients would re­ceive fam­i­ly sup­port if treat­ed in their com­mu­ni­ty.

So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Cherie Ann Crichlow-Cock­burn said 45 so­cial­ly dis­placed peo­ple were re­moved from T&T’s streets be­tween Sep­tem­ber 2015 and Jan­u­ary and are cur­rent­ly housed at the River­side Cen­tre, Port-of-Spain.