Dawes: Health sector at a tipping point

Opposition Spokesman on Health, Dr Alfred Dawes, is expressing solidarity with the healthcare workers who are today protesting the infrastructure challenges and human resources deficiencies facing Jamaica's public health system by wearing black. 

Clad in black at a press conference earlier this afternoon, Dawes, who is also a medical doctor, pointed fingers at Health and Wellness Minister Dr Christopher Tufton who he said has resorted to a “blame game”, instead of addressing the infrastructural issues at the island's only specialist paediatric hospital. 

Last Thursday, The Gleaner reported that spinal surgery for 11-year-old Ajanae Parchment, diagnosed with severe scoliosis, was postponed at the Bustamante Hospital for Children because the air conditioning, among other things, in the operating theatre was not up to standard.

Tufton, in a press conference that same day, said arrangements were being made to have the surgery performed at the University Hospital of the West Indies. He also asserted that there was no money issue involved in addressing the challenges facing Jamaica's public-health facilities, but that “systemic defects” are behind the ills affecting some operations at hospitals.

But according to Dawes, Tufton's response is “pitting administrators against doctors, suppliers against the Ministry of Health in what is effectively crisis management”.  

“There is a reluctance for the persons where the buck stops to accept responsibility,” he said. 

He said the health minister's assertion that there is no money problem in the health system is an affront to the health care professionals who are working in subpar conditions. 

“The doctors who have been sitting in the mouldy clinics with fungus coming from the roof tiles; in the hot clinics without  a working fan and AC units who are there just so they can see the patients. They are making a sacrifice because it is about the patients, so they try to get the things done,” Dawes said. 

“They have to listen to the rhetoric today where it is being said the money that they have asked for repeatedly and being denied is not the problem, instead, they are,” he added. 

The Jamaica Medical Doctors' Association, in a press release on Sunday, urged the Ministry of Health and Wellness to take immediate action to address the widespread infrastructural and human resources deficiencies in Jamaica healthcare facilities. 

Stating that complaints about the health sector will become more frequent in the coming months, Dawes called for all stakeholders to work towards a resolution. 

“The powers-that-be now ought to focus on repairing the damaged relationships between themselves and the doctors, the administrators and the nurses, and even patients who have been blamed for their part in this, and see how they can all sit down and work together to stop the slide, because as I said, we are at a tipping point,” he said. 

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