Hospital reports will be more transparent under coalition government

Apr 25, 2015 News

As politicians continue to make their commitments to the Guyanese public in the lead-up to general and regional elections on May 11, the APNU+AFC coalition has said that health reports will become more transparent under a coalition government.
During a recent press conference on the state of the health system in Guyana and what can be done to improve it, the issue of non-transparency in the healthcare system was noted as an impediment to development.
Dr. George Norton of the coalition opined that the Ministry of Health is “taking the Guyanese public for granted”. He emphasised that the correct thing for the coalition to do if it is voted into power, would be to pick up pending cases currently under investigation and conclude them as expediently as possible.
He noted the case of 4 year -old Jaden Mars who died at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) in 2013, shortly after he was admitted with a bitten tongue. The boy’s mother is yet to receive a satisfactory report on the matter.
He said too, that the Ministry is operating on the basis that people will forget about the deaths and the reports as time goes away and eventually, the matters will be “swept under the carpet”.
He emphasised that oftentimes families are left begging for answers, particularly mothers of young children who would have died while in the care of the Public Health system. “That is something the coalition would take up with all vigour and immediately those cases that are pending we will, in the shortest possible time, put an end to those investigations and supply reports.”
Dr. Karen Cummings, also of the coalition, said that in this part of the Caribbean continuous medical education should be a reality. She said pending matters should be taken up at medical education sessions where they should be analysed and from those sessions, recommendations could be made. She added that relatives of dead patients should also be included in these sessions so “they can have some sense of closure”.
Similarly, Dr. Surendra Persaud said that too many deaths are being recorded at the GPHC. He said that the hospital is the major teaching institution in Guyana and should have monthly morbidity and mortality conferences, to look at adverse and unexpected outcomes and to find out what exactly caused the deaths before making a set of interventions. He emphasised that this process does not appear to be done at the hospital.
He said too, that families should not have to wait over a long period of time before they can receive a report. “The report needs to be prepared and sent up the chain of command and eventually sent to the Ministry. That should become a relatively public document,” Dr. Persaud added. He continued, “We should not have a death and not investigate it,” Persaud said. “We can’t sweep it under the carpet and expect it will mysteriously get better.”
The APNU+AFC Doctors also opined that the GPHC required an overhauling right from its top management coming down. They said that there is not much of a relationship between those at the top and those on the bottom tier.
Persaud further said that the final word in GPHC should be paramount. “The Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation chooses to be a corporation but it does not behave like a corporation…the first thing we need to do is address GPHC like a corporation; it must be held accountable, it must be held responsible and the people who work there need to be accountable to the people,” Persaud said.
Meanwhile, Dr. Norton made the commitment that investigations will be subjected to a time frame in which they must be submitted and become public documents up for scrutiny.
Dr. Cummings added, that the current administration practices “narrow politics” where information is withheld from the public.

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Hospital reports will be more transparent under coalition government

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