The Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) belongs to the people of Barbados and the citizens of this country should expect and deserve nothing but the highest quality service when they have to attend the Martindales Road, St Michael institution.
Those are undisputable facts. The reality, however, is far from desirable, if the litany of complaints being aired on radio and social media is to be believed.
We accept that with every scenario, there will be a level of incompleteness because there may be critical facts about the situations that have not been publicised.
The problem for most people is that 1,000 Frenchmen cannot be wrong. Something has gone wrong at our hospital and the public ought to have the facts.
We are reminded that just a month ago, senior officials of the island’s main tertiary health institution were boasting about how they had managed to drastically reduce waiting times at the QEH’s Accident and Emergency Department.
The team contended that suggestions of 48-hour and longer waits for patients attending A&E were hyperbolic. Furthermore, they said on some days the department was virtually empty because people were treated on a timely basis and discharged.
Well, someone needs to explain how we have come to a situation where Barbadians are posting horror stories of their experiences in A&E.
We have even heard of people dying after days of waiting without being seen by a physician.
Managing such a large institution with hundreds of employees, that is also being used by thousands of people on a 24-hour basis, must certainly be challenging.
The hospital is also going through a transition phase as it is currently seeking a new chief executive officer, following the departure of executive chairman Juliette Bynoe-Sutherland.
The QEH uses a sizeable portion of this country’s very large healthcare budget. The question that we must now ask ourselves is whether we are getting the best bang for our taxpayer dollars.
The QEH is obviously such a handful that it has been assigned its own Minister. However, there are only so many times that the public will accept apologies from the Minister and promises that improvements are coming.
Dr Sonia Browne responded recently acknowledging that the QEH had been failing to communicate with patients in a timely manner during their stay in the A&E.
“This is an issue to which I have given priority and QEH management has been tasked to improve the lines of communication between our [A&E] medical teams and the patients in their care,” Dr Browne said.
It is noteworthy that the administration is fast tracking plans for reform of state-owned corporations. It would certainly not be out of order for the government to undertake an urgent and expansive review of the management and operations of the QEH.
Clearly the public is very dissatisfied. In the meantime, new privately operated 24-hour health facilities are springing up across the island.
Local medical professionals are obviously assessing there is a critical need for alternatives to the QEH.
What this is likely to do is create a two-tiered health care system where the have-nots take their chances with the state-owned facility and hope they will be treated at A&E in a timely manner before their medical situation deteriorates.
Those Barbadians with means and medical insurance to supplement, will attend one of the private clinics where the service is friendlier, faster, and hopefully of higher quality.
This is not the kind of healthcare structure that Barbados was built on. Universal healthcare should not be poor treatment for the poor and quality treatment for those who can pay.
We can do better, and we must do better. If more than $140 million annually in taxpayers’ money is going to fund the QEH, citizens deserve much better care.
