Strive for equity and equality in the health sector – PAHO/WHO Rep. urges

Mar 04, 2017 News

While equity and equality of health care are goals that the Ministry of Public Health is aiming for, one should not be confused for the other. This assertion was recently made by Resident Representative of the Pan American Health

PAHO/WHO Resident Representative, Dr. William Adu-Krow

Organisation/World Health Organisation (PAHO/WHO), Dr. William Adu-Krow, when he addressed a gathering of regional health managers.
According to Dr. Adu-Krow, he is of the realisation that “we tend to treat them (equality and equity) as the same but they are not.” He sought to qualify his statement by noting that in Guyana there is the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC), a premier public health institution that is available to all and by extension represents health equality.
“Everybody can go there,” noted Dr. Adu-Krow. He, however, continued by pointing out that “if you live in Lethem and you have an emergency…let’s say you are in labour and you have to be flown to GPHC and they tell you ‘oh no this is false labour, but since you have risk factors we want to keep you in Georgetown for a while so go to a halfway house or find your own place and you can’t, and therefore you may be forced to go back home [to Lethem], that is not equity.”
Moreover, Dr. Adu-Krow asserted that while equity on one hand measures fairness, equality on the other hand means that something is there for all to access.
“I think we have to be very careful. We have to create both equity and equality.”
But Dr. Adu-Krow is convinced that by embracing research conducted by PAHO, the Public Health Ministry through its regional managers could achieve the goals of both equity and equality in the delivery of health care. For this reason, he appealed for the senior officials within the Public Health Ministry to make available the findings of the research to regional officials. Once embraced, Dr. Adu-Krow believes that the public health sector will have in place a suitable format for its health authority.
He however asserted that “I think the [existing] health authority system is a good system [but] it may have to be looked at. It was not promulgated the way that it should have been done in its totality. However, the core element of it happens to be a good system.”
Although there are improvements that can be made, Dr. Adu-Krow noted that even if the Public Health Ministry is not able to realise the ideal health system, “then let us make the best we can of the present system.”
One of the major aspects of having a system that is efficient, Dr. Adu-Krow said, is the importance of “measuring what we do, where we are, where we come from and where we want to go.” This tactic has been accepted by the Ministers of Public Health, Ms. Volda Lawrence and Ms. Karen Cummings.
And this could be realised, he noted, even if the managers of respective regions are non-clinicians.
“Sometimes you have non-clinicians and they do the work and they do it well. I am telling you this because in Jamaica, one such manager realised that she was referring a lot of cases to the capital…so she decided to look at the data over a span of two years, and then she realised that 85 percent of them were either obstetric or gynaecological in nature. All that she did was to ask for an Obstetrician and she used the data to show, and immediately she was given that, and her referrals fell 95 percent,” related Dr. Adu-Krow, as he stressed the importance of research in effectively managing the health sector. In so doing the PAHO/WHO Resident Representative has urged that efforts be made to strive for equity and equality.