Berbicians not satisfied with healthcare delivery, Health Minister hears

Feb 09, 2013 News

---

… seniors to ‘face the fire’

 

Minister of Health, Dr. Bheri Ramsaran, has stated that it is evident there is a general dissatisfaction among Berbicians about health services being provided in that region.
Therefore, health care officials, especially the seniors in the system will be made to ‘face the music’ more often and to account to the public for their actions.
He said this after an all-day interaction and meeting with numerous Berbicians from various communities this past week.
Additionally, several complaints were raised with the Minister on a Live call-in TV programme. They ranged from poor services at the various hospitals in Regions Five and Six; bossy attitudes of security guards at the hospitals and the attitudes of nurses.
“It is coming out more and more that there is clientele dissatisfaction with the services being offered.” He held numerous meetings across Berbice on Monday, visiting Angoy’s Avenue and several areas on the Corentyne and West Berbice.
“We have to face it. I am thinking of incorporating a more popular element so that the regular, ordinary, rank and file resident can benefit.”
Time and time again, numerous Berbicians have been stepping forward with their criticisms and complaints about poor services being provided by the various health care facilities in the region. Now, the Minister of Health himself is admitting the fact.
The Berbice Regional Health Authority (BRHA) is the umbrella body tasked with overseeing the efficient delivery of healthcare services in the two regions. A new board was installed last July, but Dr. Ramsaran stated that no reports have ever been submitted to the Ministry of Health. “We came in after six months…and we have been following the Berbice scenario for some time”.
“There have been continuous complaints from the Berbice clientele,” he noted. The Minister stated, too, that during a visit to the region last year, he brought with him some bed pans for the New Amsterdam Hospital.
“I delivered them to Mr. [Alan] Johnson (CEO of the N/A Hospital) on the steps of the hospital, because I have been having frequent complaints by patients who visit the hospital that there are no bed pans—and don’t let them tell me I am lying!”
Dr. Ramsaran went on to say that he was informed by patients at the facility whom he knew at the time, that several days after he brought the bed pans to Berbice, they were not deployed…”so we need to have some ‘peep- in’ from the clientele and by the regular patients and Berbicians into the hospital’s affairs”.
To remedy this problem, Dr. Ramsaran has proposed “quality” town- hall styled meetings.
“We will have public meetings on the television where the team will come and line-up here and face the music and have reports including the nursing staff, because they are perennially rude—I have those complaints all the time from people who are genuine…They don’t have any reason to lie”.
The public meetings, he stated, will also be held at the town hall, hospital boardrooms and Regional Democratic Council (RDC) boardrooms “so people can go and express these things”.
The Minister said, “It is very sad that many of the complaints are about the ethics and rudeness, ill- manners of the nurses…The number of complaints against the nursing staff is too much”.
He is urging the senior staff to effect more visits to the proverbial ‘shop floor’ or the hospitals and health centres themselves since the junior staff “seems to be having a field day”.
The management problem, he opined, exists at the level of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Regional Health Authority, and the CEO of the N/A Hospital- there needs to be more communication—this is your major facility…There are not many health facilities in East Berbice, so they can be visited practically every day, he said.
The administration, he reiterated, is doling out more and more resources to the health sector in the Region but that it seems that these resources are being underutilized or not utilized at all.
The path that the Ministry of Health is taking in this regard is what he termed ‘regime change’, as was the case in Region Two recently.
“Regime change in that personnel have been changed, and we are getting better results—More surgeries are being done, more services are being offered and fewer patients are going to the Georgetown hospital,” he posited.
He is deeply concerned about reports of security guards at the various hospitals determining who has access to healthcare.
“This is horrendous! It used to be so at the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPHC)…They have solved that problem; it was emerging at the Diamond Hospital and we have almost solved that problem there. It’s shocking that this is happening here, and it shows the lack of management.”

---

---