EDITORIAL - Dr Ferguson's snake oil

Dr Fenton Ferguson, the health minister, would have been taken no less seriously if he had set up a stall in a village square and dispensed snake oil or engaged in three-card tricks.

He, instead, decided to set up a task force, and give it the weighty, if incomprehensible, job to review "ongoing systemic challenges at the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH) and make feasible recommendations for improvement in service delivery in the short and medium term at the institution".

Dr Ferguson's task force will have 16 members who, with luck, will avoid becoming a tangled Babel. Its members have not been named, but they will be from among the managers of KPH, the South East Regional Health Authority (SERHA), "as well as users of the institution and external expertise".

We look forward to the naming of the group and, particularly, the process by which panel members representing "users of the institution" will be selected. In the meantime, we will make some relevant observations.

SERHA manages a cluster of government-owned hospitals, of which KPH, a major general hospital that treats a large number of trauma cases, is one. Three weeks ago, this newspaper, after an undercover investigation, reported on poor patient care at the hospital and general abysmal management of the facility. In some respects, The Sunday Gleaner's story rehashed things that were known and of which managers and policymakers ought to have been aware.

With regard to structure, SERHA, like other regional health authorities, has a board of directors appointed by the health minister that is tasked with ensuring the implementation of the Government's hospital-management policies for a specific region. SERHA has a senior administrator that coordinates the work of the hospitals, each of which has a CEO and a chief medical officer. In other words, there are, at least on an organisational chart, clear lines of reporting and processes of accountability.

If, therefore, the operations of a hospital falter, it is for the managers of that institution, in the first instance, to be held accountable by those to whom they report, in this case, the SERHA management and, ultimately, the authority's board.

Missed the shortcomings

In the case of KPH, its management appears to have been lax. Further, those who are in charge of the day-to-day operations and who, therefore, had oversight of all hospitals in the region, missed the shortcomings. Then the SERHA board failed, at the regional level and at KPH, to discern these weaknesses.

In the normal scheme of things, these persons might have been held to account, or Minister Ferguson might have pointed to extenuating circumstances why he would do otherwise. He did neither.

He has, instead, chosen to waffle and obfuscate. His task force, it has been reported, will consider issues, some of which "were already subject to a review by the board of management of ... SERHA".

They will go over old ground rather than fix problems. And the expectation, perhaps, is that we will be mesmerised by the process. But, as Dr Ferguson would know, snake oil offers no real cure, at least not for what ails KPH.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.