Tweet
ALMOST 90 per cent of Jamaican doctors recently surveyed feel public health care delivery is headed in the wrong direction, with a quarter of them saying the best way to turn this around is to end the free health care system.
The data is from a new survey done by the Jamaica Medical Doctors Association (JMDA) and released exclusively to the Observer yesterday at the newspaper’s weekly Monday Exchange.
A representative sample of 140 doctors spread across various levels of the health care system islandwide were polled by the association between May and June this year as it sought to give weight to repeated complaints about high levels of discontent and frustration among public health care practitioners.
Seventy-eight per cent of those polled were medical officers, 10 per cent were interns or student doctors, seven per cent were consultants, while senior health officers made up the remainder of the sample.
The doctors delivered a scathing indictment of the current free health care system with a whopping 88 per cent of them saying public health care is going down the wrong path.
“It is alarming, it is very concerning that 88 per cent of us think we’re going in the wrong direction and things are not as they should be,” JMDA President Dr Shane Alexis told reporters and editors at the Monday Exchange.
The survey also asked the doctors what they thought should be done to improve health care delivery. 27.3 per cent said “reverse free health care”.
Dr Alexis hastened to temper this verdict, noting that the JMDA was not totally against the “no user-fee” health care system. Instead he said the doctors just wanted more resources to prevent public health care standards going into free-fall.
“The JMDA has maintained the principle that we are not averse to the policy of the abolition of user fees,” he said. “What we believe is that every policy should be adequately funded so the resources must be put to support a policy. It can’t just be a policy suspended in the air, it has to be a policy supported from the ground up.”
The pilot study indicated that about 22 per cent of the doctors polled thought an increased budgetary allocation to the health sector would solve a lot of problems.
“In other words, of your GDP, the percentage that we allocate should move from four per cent where it is now to 10,” said the JMDA president.
Seventy-five per cent of respondents in the JMDA poll also admitted they were dissatisfied with the level of health care given at the medical facility to which they were assigned.
These included the Bustamante Children’s Hospital, the Kingston Public and Victoria Jubilee hospitals, Cornwall Regional in St James and the University Hospital of the West Indies, classified as urban centres. The sentiment also reflected that of doctors employed to rural medical facilities such as those in Mandeville and May Pen and health clinics.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/...ors-tell-Gov-t
The data is from a new survey done by the Jamaica Medical Doctors Association (JMDA) and released exclusively to the Observer yesterday at the newspaper’s weekly Monday Exchange.
A representative sample of 140 doctors spread across various levels of the health care system islandwide were polled by the association between May and June this year as it sought to give weight to repeated complaints about high levels of discontent and frustration among public health care practitioners.
Seventy-eight per cent of those polled were medical officers, 10 per cent were interns or student doctors, seven per cent were consultants, while senior health officers made up the remainder of the sample.
The doctors delivered a scathing indictment of the current free health care system with a whopping 88 per cent of them saying public health care is going down the wrong path.
“It is alarming, it is very concerning that 88 per cent of us think we’re going in the wrong direction and things are not as they should be,” JMDA President Dr Shane Alexis told reporters and editors at the Monday Exchange.
The survey also asked the doctors what they thought should be done to improve health care delivery. 27.3 per cent said “reverse free health care”.
Dr Alexis hastened to temper this verdict, noting that the JMDA was not totally against the “no user-fee” health care system. Instead he said the doctors just wanted more resources to prevent public health care standards going into free-fall.
“The JMDA has maintained the principle that we are not averse to the policy of the abolition of user fees,” he said. “What we believe is that every policy should be adequately funded so the resources must be put to support a policy. It can’t just be a policy suspended in the air, it has to be a policy supported from the ground up.”
The pilot study indicated that about 22 per cent of the doctors polled thought an increased budgetary allocation to the health sector would solve a lot of problems.
“In other words, of your GDP, the percentage that we allocate should move from four per cent where it is now to 10,” said the JMDA president.
Seventy-five per cent of respondents in the JMDA poll also admitted they were dissatisfied with the level of health care given at the medical facility to which they were assigned.
These included the Bustamante Children’s Hospital, the Kingston Public and Victoria Jubilee hospitals, Cornwall Regional in St James and the University Hospital of the West Indies, classified as urban centres. The sentiment also reflected that of doctors employed to rural medical facilities such as those in Mandeville and May Pen and health clinics.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/...ors-tell-Gov-t
Comment