An­na-Lisa Paul

Se­nior Re­port

ann-lisa.paul@guardian.co.tt

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh yes­ter­day ac­cused Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar of flip-flop­ping on se­ri­ous is­sues that she and her Cab­i­net had de­lib­er­at­ed on when she sat as head of the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil. He de­scribed as un­for­tu­nate some of the calls and com­ments be­ing made on po­lit­i­cal plat­forms with­in re­cent days which he claimed were signs of her “des­per­a­tion.”

Per­sad-Bisses­sar has come un­der fire from var­i­ous quar­ters fol­low­ing her calls for the pub­lic to “emp­ty the clip” and “load up the ‘mat­ic” on home in­vaders, us­ing lyrics sim­i­lar in slang and mean­ing to those used by Trini­bad artistes in their songs.

Deyals­ingh, who spoke with re­porters at a Ba­by-Friend­ly Hos­pi­tal Ini­tia­tive Ac­cred­i­ta­tion Cer­e­mo­ny at the Mt Hope Women’s Hos­pi­tal, said he is con­fi­dent as the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) con­tin­ues to cam­paign for the Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tion on Au­gust 14. He said he is deeply in­volved in five sep­a­rate camps sup­port­ing hope­ful can­di­dates.

Com­ment­ing on Fri­day’s protest by reg­is­tered nurs­es in Port-of-Spain, the min­is­ter said he is will­ing to hold dis­cus­sions with the head of the T&T Reg­is­tered Nurs­es As­so­ci­a­tion (TTR­NA) Idi Stu­art.

Stu­art led a large con­tin­gent of nurs­ing per­son­nel on a peace­ful march through the cap­i­tal call­ing for an im­me­di­ate end to un­safe nurse-to-pa­tient ra­tios. The nurs­es claim there is one nurse to ten or more pa­tients on hos­pi­tal wards.

How­ev­er, the main fo­cus for Deyals­ingh was the Mt Hope Women’s Hos­pi­tal be­com­ing the first med­ical in­sti­tu­tion in T&T to be cer­ti­fied by the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (PA­HO) as a ba­by-friend­ly fa­cil­i­ty. The Ba­by-Friend­ly Hos­pi­tal Ini­tia­tive (BFHI) is a glob­al ef­fort by the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion and UNICEF to im­ple­ment prac­tices that pro­tect, pro­mote and sup­port breast­feed­ing.

The min­is­ter said with strin­gent ef­forts to move it along, sup­port for the Na­tion­al Breast­feed­ing Pol­i­cy of 2020 has moved up from just around ten per cent to 95 per cent. He said ma­ter­nal and neo-na­tal mor­tal­i­ty are two ar­eas lo­cal health of­fi­cials have been able to con­quer and a na­tion­al dis­cus­sion should soon get start­ed on menopause.

Deyals­ingh ad­mit­ted that there hasn’t been suf­fi­cient in­for­ma­tion for women, their part­ners and chil­dren, and as a re­sult “women con­tin­ue to suf­fer in si­lence.” He chal­lenged of­fi­cials to come up with an ed­u­ca­tion cam­paign to ad­dress this “un­equal bur­den” that has left so many strug­gling.