There is a sense in which the Tuesday, December 31st Stabroek News lead story – ‘GPHC says has seen over 60,000 patients this year’ provides a generous measure of enlightenment on both the nature and the scale of the challenges (crises?) confronting the country’s health sector, as a whole. Paradoxically, however, it afforded one of the most ‘bad-talked’ state-run institutions in the country an opportunity to blow its trumpet.
Unsurprisingly, when occasions arise (justified or otherwise) for the GPHC to ‘tek blows’ from its critics, mitigating circumstances (like what we are told is a current acute shortage of trained and experienced nurses) that might excuse the institution’s shortcomings are rarely if ever taken account of. That is a ‘cross’ that the GPHC has had to bear over several years. Here, there has been no clear indication, over the years, that the Ministry of Health is prepared to ‘talk up’ those aspects of the services that the GPHC provides and the extent to which those contribute to the overall national health regime, as a whole.
Here, one hastens to add that the role played by the GPHC in contributing to the overall national health care offering – when set against the prevailing high costs of private medical treatment – is, unquestionably, irreplaceable. But for the ‘shift’ which the GPHC continues to ‘put in,’ the overall profile of the country’s health care delivery regime would be in an immeasurably more disturbing condition than it is at this time.
One might add here that there is no indication that the long-announced planned ‘importation’ of nursing skills into the country, is going to happen at as rapid a pace as we had been led to believe. This intended development is geared, for the most part, to target the ‘pockets’ of expatriates, who, over time, will be stationed here to manage the operations of foreign entities with interests in the oil and gas and other sectors that are expected to emerge from foreign investments.
It is quite significant that even though under-resourced, 60,000 persons have had to use the GPHC as a ‘fallback’ as private medical care remains unaffordable for them. Interestingly, the ‘strap line’ in the aforementioned Stabroek News story alludes to what is widely believed to be a critical Achilles heel in the fabric of the state-run health service, which is, the GPHC, in its present condition, “needs at least 700 nurses.” Whew!
What these numbers say is that there is hardly any need for us to go ‘ferretting around’ for reasons why the state-run health system is widely seen as being out of its depth insofar as the effective delivery of its mission is concerned. The ‘bottom line’ here is that if the deficit in the GPHC’s nursing care resources is as high as 700 then, surely, it is close to a miracle that the institution continues to provide the service that it does.
On this particular ‘score,’ it has to be said that the Ministry of Health, which so frequently appears to be struggling with accountability and other management issues now appears to be confronted with an increasingly challenging mountain to climb in relation to human resources.
Conversations with nurses serving in the state-run health service bring out equal measures of concern over what is felt to be an enormous gap between workload and remuneration coupled with a compulsive feeling that the current discourses at various levels about the importation of foreign nurses into Guyana amounts to a ‘message’ that has to do with ‘the worth’ or otherwise of locally trained nurses. Here, it is, these days, an absurdity to encounter stories of the ‘trials’ of nurses who seek to migrate into the profession in Britain and the United States only to emerge from that pursuit with experiences that leave them more than a trifle ‘worn down.’
To return to the reported existing deficit of 700 nurses at the Georgetown Hospital, it is difficult to envisage any meaningful improvement in the institution’s patient care regime if that situation persists. Perhaps, more to the point, the question should be asked as to whether the very fact of such an enormous deficit in nursing resources at the GPHC does not amount to an even more compelling incentive for those nurses, currently serving in the system, to continue to weigh their options.
What the report in the Tuesday, December 31st issue of the Stabroek News reveals is that the Georgetown Hospital is a microcosm of a wider problem that not only exposes the frailties of the country’s overall patient care regime, but, as well, raises questions as to whether a national health service can rise to the challenge of its growing mandate.