‘Jesus Wept’

A leading surgeon took to the floor of the Senate on Wednesday to denounce the state of healthcare in Barbados as a “tragedy”, invoking the shortest verse in the Bible.

Independent Senator Christopher Maynard, a noted ear, nose and throat surgeon, told fellow lawmakers that the country was responsible for the state of healthcare and all must work to fix it. This repair job cannot be remedied by the government alone, the board of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital or the staff, he said.

A visit to the QEH Accident and Emergency Department on Saturday led him to recall the Bible verse, “Jesus wept”, he said in the debate on the Appropriation Bill for the new fiscal year that begins on Monday.

“There are some obligations that the government needs to meet. My visit to the A&E was after 8 p.m. but there was no place in the hospital to buy food at 8 p.m. The cafeteria closes at 3. We cannot have a 24-hour hospital and you can’t get food at night,” he said.

Of QEH staff, the surgeon-lawmaker said: “We have to demand that those who are to work, work and produce. Those who we pay large sums of money have to come to work. And we have to make some hard, harsh decisions on how to sanction those who don’t come to work and who don’t produce.”

Noting that Barbadians pay a three per cent health levy which has raised about $70 million annually for the hospital’s operations, he added: “It’s a nice insurance policy to the QEH and I think we can do far better than we are doing but somebody has to truly take responsible at an executive level and make sure it’s done.”

Senator Maynard said while the experience of COVID-19 meant that there were changes with working from home, this is not an option for healthcare workers who must show up in person.

“There are people who believe you can be a full-time healthcare worker from home, but the reality is that you can’t [be]. People need in-person interaction,” he said, adding that compassion has disappeared since the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said when the government, during the pandemic, made the correct decision to curtail certain services at the QEH and continued to pay the staff in full, it created a problem.

“It meant that those who continued to work had more time to themselves. They were not at the beach because you couldn’t go to the beach, but you were busy seeing patients. The pandemic is declared over, and you now have to ask those persons who had reassigned their time to realise that they do have another job and to come back to work and produce.”

He suggested that methods must be found to create the enthusiasm that is needed to work in a system that has gotten worse and is more difficult to work in.

The senator also pleaded for a system which guarantees food availability at the hospital over 24 hours: “It cannot be that you can expect the place with the largest number of government workers under one roof not to have access to food. When it happens that there is a disaster and you have to stay in the hospital, the problem still exists. So, you are expected to provide care while you starve.”

Whoever gets such a contract, he added, must be set a minimum level for the provision of meals in a facility that caters to people all day.

He called on the Minister of Health Senator Jerome Walcott, to fix the meals issue.

Senator Maynard also addressed the situation at the hospital outpatient clinics which he said has always been overcrowded. He recalled that when he returned from Jamaica 40 years ago, he had become accustomed to a certain level of functioning in Jamaica that was the same here but was surprised back then to observe two doctors seeing patients in one room with no privacy for the consultations which could clearly be overheard.

“Forty years on and the same thing is happening. It means that successive governments, over and over again, have done nothing to fix it,” he declared.

Senator Maynard said he hoped with the expansion of the QEH services across the road at the Elmore compound as outlined by the health minister, this situation would be changed.

But he said the short-term solution may be to use porta cabins from which to conduct some services and alleviate the overcrowding.

The healthcare professional said the system plagued by the exodus of doctors and nurses and low morale must be transformed into an environment where professionals see the benefits of staying, and he encouraged the health ministry to do everything to improve the lot of healthcare workers.

(SP)