WRHA seeks help to relocate 60 social patients
Published:Thursday | August 19, 2021 | 12:09 AMAlbert Ferguson/Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
St Andrade Sinclair, regional director of the Western Regional Health Authority (WRHA), intends to partner with the municipal corporations in the four parishes it oversees to find alternative accommodation for the 60 social patients now occupying much-needed hospital bed space.
Sinclair said that he is currently looking at how the local infirmaries could assist in addressing the situation for these social patients, who have been discharged but have been abandoned by their families at the health facilities and have no place to live.
“You will find that most of the social cases are male, not so much women. Therefore, I am looking at forging an association with the four parishes in meeting with the mayors and the chief executive officers to see what can be done,” Sinclair told The Gleaner yesterday. “I will be writing to each one of them.”
The long-standing problem of social patients at public hospitals has been made worse with the COVID-19 pandemic, as the facilities struggle to find space to admit critically ill patients.
“It is a major problem we are facing here in the west,” said Sinclair, adding each of the four hospitals it manages – Cornwall Regional (St James), Falmouth (Trelawny), Noel Holmes (Hanover), and Savanna-la-Mar (Westmoreland) – had social patients.
While he was not immediately able to provide the cost associated with caring for these social patients, Sinclair said they were seriously stretching the available resources.
“It’s getting to be a big drain on the healthcare system in this region. We can’t look after them any more in the hospital because lives are being lost,” stressed Sinclair, who called on the families of these social patients to come and get them. “You can’t treat them like that; they are human beings.”
He told The Gleaner that when contacted, many family members bluntly say they do not want to have anything to do with their relatives in the hospitals.
“The usual response is that they are never there for them growing up, especially the male ones. The fathers did not take care of them as a child, so now that he has become susceptible, they have abandoned him,” he explained.
“Whenever they become deceased, all of a sudden you see family members turn up from everywhere to get death certificates and all different types of things, and when you check it out, maybe there is some legacy,” Sinclair noted.