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.
Comments