Taureef Mohammed
MUCH HAS been written about the problems facing healthcare in TT, but little has been done to rectify them.
In researching this column, I came across article after article pointing out the same problems - problems that kept repeating over and over again, year after year, administration after administration.
It became clear that behind the public-relations gimmickry - the ribbon-cuttings, the plaque-unveilings - there was a malaise crippling the healthcare system.
Those at the top are in a delusional state. Their heads in the clouds, they are incapable of seeing the problems that ordinary people see. They take every opportunity to boast loudly about what they see as their achievements, deaf to complaints and recommendations from ordinary people.
Do they really believe that a system that has not undergone any major transformational change for over 30 years is well adapted to deliver healthcare in 2025? Why do they play smart with stupidness, talking about rolling out artificial intelligence in a system designed in the 1990s?
We will soon have a newly-elected government. Perhaps now is a good time to remind those seeking our votes of two issues that need addressing, STAT.
1. Creating a national health insurance plan
It is a shame that in 2025 - more than 50 years after independence, more than 30 years after TT established its own medical school - we do not have a proper financial system in place that allows all citizens to access the best healthcare that this country has to offer.
In 2015, then newly-appointed Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh, in an interview with Kalifa Clyne, spoke on the issue, saying the plan was to transition to a national health insurance system by 2018.
"Our manifesto which is our policy speaks to a national comprehensive system which will give all citizens the basic right to be treated at any institution of their choice and receive healthcare to which they are entitled.'
By 'any institution of their choice' he meant private or public.
What happened? The plan vanished - it was just talk.
Meanwhile, the disgraceful situation of patients going to private hospital emergency rooms only to be shuttled out when it became clear they could not afford private healthcare continued; patients continued to present at public hospitals with heart attacks, unable to get timely cardiac angiograms, although multiple privately-owned cardiac catherisation labs surrounded some of these hospitals.
And we remember how, a few years ago, dialysis patients were forced to seek the help of a lawyer after the government had failed to pay for their dialysis sessions at a private dialysis centre as part of the External Patient Programme.
A shameful and disgraceful reality that can be fixed with a national health insurance plan.
2. Reform the RHA system
A system that was designed to dismantle a central power hierarchy has instead multiplied it, manyfold. We have witnessed this over and over again - and it is getting sickening.
Just a few weeks ago the So
