As in so many areas of national life, citizens are today wondering whether another “investigation” into a major issue will produce results regarding the solution to the problems identified.
As parents make known their babies who died in hospitals, the classic institutional response has been offered by the North West Regional Health Authority (NWRHA). This time, in an attempt to defend itself beforehand, is a claim that the “neo-natal mortality rate 2022 of 6.2 deaths of every 1,000 births is lower than anywhere else in the Caribbean”. The undercurrent comment here is, “What are you complaining about, we are doing well?”
The bare data notwithstanding, the whole story must surely be wider and far more influenced by the circumstances of the health systems in the countries with which the comparisons are made, including the resources available here, the healthcare information given to parents along the journey to birth, and the preparation of mothers for nurturing their babies after birth to ensure the growth of healthy infants.
No mother, whatever the NWRHA's attempts at comparisons with other countries through data, will be comforted by the comparisons to other countries. The probability of an ineffective turn-out of this investigation, however, is based on the known history of such queries into major issues which have revealed little by way of satisfactory explanations.
Worse still, such investigations have not resulted in a change in the functioning of the institutions, in this instance the major hospitals of the state.
Given the usually non-committal findings of investigations in the healthcare system, it is rare that there is a direct allocation of responsibility to an individual and/or a team.
Usually, therefore, healthcare personnel involved in incidents in which true professionalism was lacking pay no penalty, no transformation of operating systems is done, and the healthcare personnel fail to gain a true learning experience from personnel errors and or institutional inadequacy.
What a typically inadequate response also does is to make allocations and expenditures of large sums of public funds on broken systems and unprofessional staff wasted annually. Without wanting to ascribe blame to specific individuals and categories of workers, there can be no learning experience which can be made out of the individual and institutional errors.
Most importantly, the executives of the health institutions, and even those who hold ministerial positions with political responsibility to the national community, escape judgement on their behaviours.
A history of not finding causes of defects in the system also means there are no problems to be fixed, no systems to be restructured and predictably, it will only be a matter of time before another set of undesirable situations arise. It goes almost without saying that such inadequacies are not exclusive to the health sector.
The large percentage of the population dependent on the state healthcare services must surely feel inadequately served at very high costs. A logical conclusion to draw, therefore, is that the individuals and institutions of professional workers across different aspects of state planning and operations are not being sufficiently challenged and held responsible for their duties. We hope that this time around, as Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, has promised, no stone is left unturned to find the answers and rectify the issues.
