People deserve better health care

 FAMILIES are losing their loved ones everyday through illness but the most frustrating aspect of their deaths is the fact that all government hospitals in Papua New Guinea are ill-equipped and lack specialist medical staff.

When the Government tries to upgrade hospitals and health facilities, they are faced with all kinds of obstacles. 

There is little or no doubt that public hospitals in this country are inundated with maladministration and mismanagement by the respective hospital boards. 

The hospitals are critically ill-equipped and under-resourced, which severely affects their capabilities to provide quality healthcare.

Therefore, urgent measures are needed to improve the management of our public hospitals and the healthcare they provide.

First and most, the Government needs to streamline the administration aspects of major referral hospitals, especially the hospital boards. 

In fact, they should cut unnecessary red tape in hospital management and align the chief executive officers of the hospitals to one regulatory hospital board, which is directly responsible to the Health Department and Ministry. 

Eventually, that function should be transferred to an independent authority for all national referral hospitals. 

Once that is achieved, and then this authority board can start looking at the appropriate measures to build capacity into our national referral hospitals to have the ability and capacity to deliver quality health care. 

They will hand manage end to end and ensure their capacity and ability that our medical doctors and nurses have the best and latest medical equipment that are covered with back to back technical support and warranty from the equipment suppliers. 

From CT scans, ultrasound machines, MRI scans to digital X-ray systems and the lot. 

That we have the best and well trained and regularly updated technically skilled biomedical engineers, managers and technicians to ensure all these medical equipment are always up and running for our doctors and nurses use to save and prevent loss of lives, through early detection and prevention of the root cause of illness or medical disorder. 

They will ensure that we can fund visiting experienced overseas medical specialists where we do not have and at the same time utilise them on either long or short term contracts to build skills capacity and have these skills transferred to local specialists, such as general and heart surgeons and cancer treatment specialist doctors and nurses. 

These health authorities must ensure that skilled local specialists are well looked after and retained for at least five to 10 years with binding employment contracts. 

With all of these the Government must be prepared to provide sufficient funds annually to building capacity for our current primary health care system.

They must be prepared to commit and remain committed to allocate K500-K800 million per year to maintain and sustain a quality health care system. 

Money should no longer be an issue for the country with the upturn in the economy spurred by the production of liquefied natural gas.

We need to put aside personal differences of how to fix loopholes in our primary health care system and at the same time seriously commit to entry and pushing secondary health to a new level. 

Yes, there are still problems today in our primary health care system, which one cannot deny. 

But to get to the secondary level of health care, which focus on maintaining a quality health care system, we need to start fixing the management red tapes to deliver primary health care system properly and at the same time kick-start secondary health care systems. 

Some may argue focus and clean-up primary health care systems first, but there is no reason why we cannot kick-start building on secondary health. 

And for that to happen we will need to have a strong, committed and visionary leadership in a new hospital authority which will lead without fear or favour to ensure that the Government’s policy initiatives and programmes for a quality healthcare system become a reality. 

That is the very least the people of the country deserve to have.