The health of our people is under crisis

When the A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) took office in May 2015, I wished them well and wanted them to succeed, in spite of our political differences. After all, it is not about the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and APNU/AFC; it is about the people of Guyana. I was hopeful that the gains we had made between 1992 and 2015 would be further improved, for the sake of our people.
It is for this reason that I mostly avoided commenting on the health sector of Guyana since APNU/AFC took over government. I wanted to give both Ministers in the Public Health Ministry the space they needed to stamp their own vision on the health sector. Both Ministers were supportive when I was the Health Minister and both had worked under my leadership. They both conceded that Guyana made significant progress in health under my leadership. I have never doubted that both Dr George Norton and Dr Karen Cummings really wanted to protect the gains we made and to further enhance the health sector of Guyana.
But it has become increasingly difficult for me to maintain my relative silence. While I understand that the political instinct would be to attack me for my comments, I am pleading with Dr Norton and Dr Cummings to remember that as Public Health Ministers, we work to better the health and lives of our people. We must score political points, but never forget that the health of our people is not a political football.
After just over a year under APNU/AFC, the health sector of Guyana is in crisis. The recent and ongoing warehouse rental scandal is merely one more negative in an accumulating stack of negatives in the sector. I know that Minister Norton is the fall guy in this scandal and rather the corruption at the level of the Public Health Ministry, I am convinced that the scandalous and disgraceful contract to rent a house as a warehouse is a contract that emanated from other parts of the APNU/AFC Cabinet.
As horrendous as the warehouse contract is, the crisis in the health sector is an even greater scandal and the health and lives of ordinary Guyanese citizens have been compromised. Even as you read this article, the physical and technological infrastructure of the health sector is rapidly deteriorating. All regional hospitals and many of the health centres require urgent attention to repair and reconstruct the physical infrastructure. Not only has the plans to reconstruct hospitals like Skeldon and West Demerara seemed to have been shelved, but the other hospitals and health centres across the country have been neglected and routine repairs and maintenance have been ignored.
Across the health sector, operating rooms are frequently inoperable. Far too often surgeries are deferred or patients referred to other hospitals because operating rooms have been closed. Whether it is because of physical infrastructural problems, equipment malfunctioning or simply the lack of supplies, patients’ well-being have been compromised. On a daily basis, one or more of the operating rooms in the public health sector is not working. As you read this statement, any check will show that somewhere in the public health sector, the operating room is not working.
There have been so many excuses when it comes to the unavailability of medicines and medical supplies; it is exhausting to recall them. As I am writing this note, the public health sector is experiencing a life-threatening shortage of insulin across the country. But this is only one of the life-threatening shortages of supplies. There are routine shortages of vaccines; diabetes, blood pressure and heart medicines; antibiotics; and laboratory supplies. It is kind of ironic that as the Public Health Ministry rented a house to store supplies at a cost of almost million per month, it has not been diligent in procuring the supplies the sector needs.
With the increase in malaria and other infectious diseases and the appearance of new infectious illnesses, the Public Health Ministry appears clueless. The Ministry has not made optimal use of the public health laboratory which in my time was one of the top public health facilities in the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It is equipped to perform high-level testing and was internationally certified. The fact that we still depend on CARPHA or other international laboratories for testing of ZIKA demonstrates how poor we have been in putting together adequate public health responses. The public health lab is equipped with PCR technology that should have allowed the Ministry to develop testing protocols for ZIKA.
Space does not allow me to detail the full scope of what is wrong with the public health response, but make no mistake, the gains we made in the sector between 1992 and 2015 are rapidly being squandered. My hope is that there will be more intense scrutiny of the State of public health in Guyana and that this will prompt the Government to heed the deterioration before we see dramatic impacts on life expectancies, child and maternal health and worsening impacts of diseases such as cancer, heart and kidney diseases, diabetes and hypertension.

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