Quality healthcare vital

PREVENTION will always be better than cure, as the saying goes.
Time after time we see and hear of our citizens falling to preventable illness or medical procedures and process that continue to take lives.
Fingers, at most times, point to the hospitals’ ill-equipped state.
Time and time we argue and debate, that we have all the money in the world to make available world-class hospitals, yet, why can’t we have the best hospital care system?
When we do try to upgrade our facilities, we are faced with roadblocks such as uncompleted projects, budget overruns and the lot that derails project completion.
These are all parts of delivering what is really lacking in our hospitals in the country, which are inundated with maladministration and mismanagement by the respective hospital boards, lack of motivation, care, pride and under-resource of health workers and, most of all, a quality healthcare system.
The Government should consider disbanding all these unnecessary red tape-type of management.
Investment in health is not only a desirable, but an essential priority for most societies.
However, our health systems face tough and complex challenges, in part derived from new pressures such as ageing populations, growing prevalence of chronic illnesses including the procurement and distribution of medical supplies.
Right now, we lack the capacity and ability to support 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.
We must also have the best and well-trained and regularly-updated technically-skilled biomedical engineers, managers and technicians to ensure all this medical equipment are always up and running for our doctors and nurses to use to save and prevent loss of lives through early detection and prevention of the root cause of an illness or medical disorder.
We need competent administrators who are supported financially to fund visiting experienced overseas medical specialists which we do not have and, at the same time, utilising them on either long or short-term contracts to build the skills capacity and have the skills transferred to local specialists who will be trained, retained and reutilised to train more locals from general surgeons to neuro-surgeons and heart surgeons to cancer treatment specialist doctors and nurses.
That skilled local medical doctors, specialists, nurses and technical resources we build must be well looked after and retained for at least five to 10 years with binding employment contracts.
Nothing is impossible.
It can be done. We just need to put aside our personal differences on how to fix the loopholes in our primary healthcare system.
Yes, there are still problems today in our primary healthcare system, which one cannot deny.
But, to get to the secondary level of healthcare which focuses on maintaining a quality system, we need to start fixing the management red tapes to properly delivery primary healthcare.
And, at the same time, kick-start secondary health care systems.
For that to happen, we will need to have a strong, committed and visionary leadership in the new hospital authority that will drive without fear or favour to ensure the Government’s desire and objective for a quality healthcare system becomes a reality.