#BTEditorial – QEH boss gave it her best shot

Next year, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) will be celebrating its 60th year of existence, serving this country as the primary health institution for the population. The majority of Barbadians can attest to having some form of interaction with the Martindales Road, St Michael institution, either through access of health care service for themselves, relatives or close friends.

Like any person or institution approaching such a milestone, there will be many memories, good and bad, accomplishments and low points. Even with the proliferation of privately operated health care facilities, the QEH still remains the main institution for the treatment of health emergencies and acute care.

It is not unheard of for people of means to attend one of the high-priced private facilities, only to be forced to turn to the publicly run QEH when critical care is required.

The hospital, with a bed capacity of 519, also holds pride of place as the accredited teaching hospital for the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus.

But we also know too well that despite the value of the institution and the outstanding role the hospital has played over the past six decades, the QEH has been the poster child for all of the maladies impacting the state owned institutions in this country.

From the frustrating bureaucracy, the decline in service standards and public interaction, the hospital has been dogged by complaints that some consultants were putting their private patients ahead of those who were accessing the services as public patients. Over the years, there has been no shortage of controversies. These ranged from malpractice allegations to the suspension of a former hospital director and his deputy.

Just days ago, Mrs Juliette Bynoe-Sutherland, the executive chairman of the QEH, announced that she was stepping away from the helm of the hospital effective June 3.

Mrs Bynoe-Sutherland began as the hospital’s chairman in July 2018. Following the departure of chief executive officer Dr Dexter James, after 10 years on the job, Bynoe-Sutherland was appointed executive chairman in 2019.

The outgoing executive chairman acknowledged in an interview with Barbados TODAY in 2021, that she had received a baptism of fire, as the wife of Member of Parliament Dwight Sutherland.

Bynoe-Sutherland, however, shook off any initial criticism and got down to the business of leading the administration of the hospital. To say it was a huge task would be the understatement of the year.

Though an attorney-at-law, Bynoe-Sutherland revealed that health care administration was her love. A trained health planner with a MSc in Health Planning Policy and Finance through a joint programme of the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, she has also worked for several regional and international organisations.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the island in full force in 2021, Bynoe-Sutherland’s leadership of the QEH was critical in the whole national response to the deadly disease.

Not only was the hospital’s management team responsible for ensuring that QEH was insulated as far as possible from spread of the disease, but they also essentially had to establish satellite health facilities at schools and hotels to treat hundreds of COVID-19 infected patients, and at the quickly assembled Harrison Point Isolation Facility in St Lucy for treating the most ill COVID patients.

As a wife and mother to a then 13-year-old son, Bynoe-Sutherland sacrificed much being on the ground with the hospital’s leadership team to ensure crises were addressed and strategically managed during the pandemic.

As Bynoe-Sutherland prepares her exit, she should be congratulated for her efforts to make a difference in the delivery of health care at the QEH.

“We hear of vehicular and other accidents and of people going into the hospital, but we don’t recognise that weeks and months later, people walk out. That there are successful surgeries, and that people’s lives are prolonged because of the interventions at the QEH,” she outlined in her 2021 interview with this newspaper.

There is a lot that negatively impacts the delivery of health care in Barbados, whether it is at the hospital or at our polyclinic system. The complaints list is long and many of the issues are systemic.

We know it is near impossible for one person to undertake the kind of transformation necessary at the QEH, but we can concede that Bynoe-Sutherland gave it her best shot.