I’ve been through the 2025 Budget twice now and have given up hope for seeing any sort of overall plan for addressing the problems that our children have. If we are lucky, more money in the pockets of parents may mean better times for them.
There are five points that concern children directly in the dollar Budget, as it will invariable become known to history.
First, the Couva Hospital, described either as the Couva Children’s Hospital or as the Couva Medical & Multi-Training Facility, which will “focus on children’s health.”
Then there are the Amendments to the Children’s Life Fund Act, which will expand to include “sickle-cell disease and rare cancers.”
There is something called the PEARL PROJECT or “Promoting Early Assessment for Resilient Learners” and which says that “challenges in vision, hearing, growth and development will be detected and addressed before they become barriers to learning” and which will “embed universal screening in our schools ensuring that difficulties are identified and addressed before they limit a child’s potential.”
There is also a statement that “vision and physical screening programmes to continue.” These may or may not be the same thing referred to elsewhere in the Budget speech which relates to “Universal Screening for children aged 4-6 to detect learning challenges early,” but includes a phrase that UNICEF will be involved.
There is also a statement on “dedicated exam concessions” for “special-needs students,” which is nothing new.
Then there is the Prime Minister’s Flagship Laptop Programme, where 18,000 “devices” will be distributed to Form 1 students.
Finally, there is CDAP and a statement about “life-saving medicine” for, among others, children with autism.
The Couva Hospital seems to have had its name changed to the “Couva Medical & Multi-Training Facility.” It has 230 beds, 150 adult and 80 paediatric, so it seems unlikely that it will “focus on children’s health.”
Questions have already been raised as to the staffing, medical, nursing and lab, so it’s unlikely to hit the ground running. Furthermore, if you pull paediatric staff away from other hospitals, what happens to the paediatric units there? The new Port-of-Spain General Hospital’s Central Block will also have 66 beds in its paediatric wards, plus 15 beds in the paediatric intensive care unit and 13 beds in the paediatric high-dependency unit, for a total of 94 beds.
Modern paediatrics is characterised by an emphasis on outpatient management of 95% of childhood diseases. Seems to me that we need one national, high-functioning children’s unit, properly staffed by paediatric nurses and speciality paediatricians, rather than this hogwash.
The expansions to the amendments to the Children’s Life Fund Act are to be congratulated. They have been a long time in coming. My only concern is that referral of certain types of children’s illnesses may restrict our specialists from learning to manage them. Consideration should be given to sending our young doctors and nurses away for training in the management of these diseases. We do have the potential of creating a Caribbean wide referral service with its accompanying financial rewards to the country.
The description of the PEARL project is a riot of confusion, obviously written by someone with no idea of what they are doing. It’s also one of these politically correct statements that have no basis in reality.
“Vision and physical screening programmes to continue.” What vision and physical screening programmes? Where in the public health system is screening done? And there is nothing about hearing screening or testing, which is still not done in the public sector.
“Screening for children aged 4-6?” That’s too late. You need to be screening children from birth at a national child development centre, where scarce resources are concentrated, as Iris Gibson’s Family in Action first proposed in 2004. If we had been doing that for the last 20 years, perhaps some of the young men with guns running around T&T might be gainfully employed.
The PM’s Flagship Laptop Programme sounds grandiose. Perhaps it would not be too late for the Government to look at the country, Sweden, that first introduced computers to their schools in 2009. They have now returned to mostly books. Computers have an important role in student learning but “there’s clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning,” Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, a highly respected medical school focused on research, said in a statement in August 2024.
Finally, CDAP. There is no such thing as a “life-saving medicine for anyone with autism.” But worse, there are almost no medications for children. This is a grave disservice to parents who must fork out hard-earned money to treat their children.
What we heard in the Budget are a series of projects, some of which are useful for children, but overall there is no philosophy on caring for the health of children.
