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  • 1 year ago
A Joint Select Committee of Parliament today heard of the many chalenges affecting the health system in Trinidad and Tobago.
But chief among them, explains CMO Dr Roshan Parasram are the NCD epidemic, retaining sufficient nursing staff and trying, with a limited budget to offer free health care to all including the growing migrant population.
Transcript
00:00A joint select committee of parliament took health officials to task over shortcomings
00:05in the sector and complaints received from members of the public during the parliament's
00:10many town meetings.
00:12Let me be more direct with my question because that answer kind of frustrated me.
00:17I'm not saying you're inaccurate.
00:20Do you have equipment challenges?
00:23Do you have staffing issues?
00:26Do you have personnel management, HR issues?
00:31Nursing staff challenges came at the top of the list.
00:34So you have all these recruitment agencies coming to Trinidad and Tobago now to recruit
00:38our very qualified nurses here.
00:40So one of the issues are that nationally the pool of available nurses is not sufficient
00:46to give us the level of nurse to patient ratio that we would like.
00:49Chief Medical Officer Dr. Roshan Parasram says arrangements are being sought with other
00:54territories to fill nursing shortages as has been done with Cuba.
00:59Anthony Bain of the NWRHA says planned maintenance can be a challenge at times with equipment
01:06running non-stop.
01:07And because of the challenges with foreign exchange, a lot of the local suppliers are
01:11not stocking spare parts in Trinidad.
01:14They rather keep their foreign exchange than have spare parts on the shelf waiting for
01:20the RHA to order.
01:21A lot of times if you have a breakdown in a piece of equipment, what will happen, the
01:24manufacturer, rep locally may say to you, it may take four weeks, three weeks and so
01:29on to get the specific part in the country.
01:32Remember, none of these dealerships would really stock other than simple maintenance
01:37part.
01:38Once it's a, how should I say, a more complex part is something that we have to go out of
01:43the country for.
01:44And it usually takes some time and obviously that will cause some downtime.
01:48The Chief Medical Officer sees the three main challenges as being the NCD epidemic,
01:54retaining nursing staff and offering free universal health care to a growing population.
02:01Offering free universal access to care in the context of also offering some of this
02:06free universal access, bearing in mind we have a non-national policy which speaks to
02:12access of public health diseases, immunization and acute emergencies for non-nationals as
02:19well.
02:20You have a growing population that is seeking public health care.
02:23So just to contextualize a little bit, the challenges that we're seeing from the policy
02:28level, retention, NCD epidemic, and of course having universal access with a finite boost.
02:36When it comes to CDAP and the finance minister's recent utterance that maintaining the program
02:41is a challenge.
02:42The committee heard when the program started in 2003 it was intended to treat eight diseases
02:49of the over 65 age group.
02:52It has now been expanded to cover 11 diseases and is accessible to all.
02:57While there are 187,000 persons on the register for the year so far, only 86,000 have accessed
03:05medication.
03:06So, is the program sustainable?
03:09That's something that, as we said, we're actually looking to undertake a review of
03:14CDAP to look at, as Sibu mentioned, what type of drugs, what are we going to add, new drugs
03:20for new conditions, look at the existing drugs, look at the population beneficiary perspective.
03:26So it's an assessment we have to do.
03:28Rupesh Itomori, Rupenraing, TV6 News.
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