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A 92-year-old man of Orange Walk passed away while waiting to see the only doctor who was on duty at the Northern Regional Hospital, an irate son wrote of his father on his social media page. It was on Saturday, October 25, when the son took his father who was in severe pain at the emergency room and was forced to wait for over an hour. At the time, Health Minister, Kevin Bernard in a release, expressed deep concern about learning of the tragic news. Bernard was a guest on the LOVE Morning Show today and weighed in on the matter which he promised a full investigation on.
Kevin Bernard, Minister of Health: “An elderly gentlemen had complications, several serious complications of other matters. But you get there you ca’t have somebody waiting with 50 minutes, especially knowing that there are certain things that you saw, right? And those are things I’m saying. And this is why I repeat that there’s policy that has been put in place and we are hoping that things like this never happen again. And we are going to continue training our people, continue talking to our people to ensure that we address these matters. Now we have to, as I said to everybody, if we have to hold people responsible we hold them responsible. There’s a process to do that too. And so we have to ensure that our people understand we are all there to provide a service to the Belizean people. And I repeat my plea, let’s serve with empathy. Let’s serve with compassion. And let’s ensure that we together can build a people centered system.”
Bernard added that if the ministry is able to develop a digital ecosystem of health, the services can be more efficient and accessible.
Kevin Bernard, Minister of Health: “We have the base already as I said, the BHIS. It’s just to build on that. It’s just to be able to connect systems, to speak to each other, to be able to provide a service. It’s to be able to train our people how to address these and to utilize these technologies to be able to provide better and efficient care for people. And so it’s the broader picture that we have to look at at the same time. But yes, it’s always a challenge when persons go to any facility. And everybody who goes to a clinic hospital, for them that’s priority. And then sometimes they don’t realize as well that there’s also a process, a process of looking at what is really the priority because you have to put emergency first. And that’s where the triage policy comes into play. But what is important, what is important, and myself and my CEO we spoke about it over the weekend is the fact that communication must be part of that process. You can’t just triage the person and just leave them there, communicate. If the doctor, if you know that okay this person has been triaged, they haven’t reached tier three which is a real priority but communicate to the patient and say you know what we will see you, the doctor will get your information as soon as possible and have somebody with that empathy, that compassion speaking to that patient so that they feel comfortable.”
One of the pressing issues that Belize is currently grappling with is the brain drain in the nursing profession. He opined that government has made a $20 million dollar investment over 10 years (2026-2036) to offset some of the challenges relating to the shortage of nurses.
Kevin Bernard, Minister of Health: “We are addressing the human resource gap. We need to ensure that we have adequate staff in place to fill the necessary vacant positions. But what have we been doing as well at the ministry? For example, in terms of nursing, I’ll use nursing as an example. We have filled out of the, I think the 100 and something vacancies 97 vacancies for nursing. That shows that we are addressing and trying our very best to fill that gap. But as we are filling these spaces, we have these big countries who are coming to poach our people. And who are they poaching? They are poaching the trained nurses. And so what we did, the government was able to approve again we took a paper for the best interests of our nurses to put in a retention package where we look at the allowances, adjustment in certain things for our nurses and it has a three phase. I know we have already implemented the first phase and then in April of next year another phase and then by the end of next year or the following year we should have the full three-phase retention package with the full compendium of allowances in place. And that’s what we’re doing to try to keep our nurses home. And for those who have opted to stay home, I thank you because this is your home, this is our country, this is our health system that we want to build and fix and improve together.”
English (US) ·