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 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 hospitalcare 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 the project completion.
All those are part and partial elements 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 health care system.
The government should consider disbanding all these unnecessary red tape of management.
Investment in health is not only desirable, but also 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 should also 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.
We need competent administrators who are supported financially to fund visiting experienced overseas medical specialist where we do not have and at the same time utilising them on either long or short term contracts to build skills capacity and have skills transferred to have local specialist trained, retained and reutilised to train more local specialist from general surgeons to neuron surgeons to heart surgeons to cancer treatment specialist doctors and nurses.
That skilled local medical doctors, specialist, nurses and technical resource we build are well looked after and retained for a least 5-10 years with binding employment contracts.
Nothing is impossible.
It can be done. We just need to put aside personal opinion difference of how to fix loop holes in our primary health care 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 healthcare system, we need to start fixing the management red tapes to delivery primary health care system properly and at the same time kick-start secondary health care systems.
And for that to happen we will need to have a strong, committed and visionary leadership in a new hospital authority who will drive without fear or favour to ensure the government’s desire and objective for our quality healthcare system because a reality.