Health sector back to bad old days of PNM

For nearly all of that time, logistical problems existed with the timely supply of medical products of all types to our health institutions for the simple reason that procurement and distribution had been centralised to a single agency, the National Insurance Property Development Company Ltd (Nipdec). Storage had also been centralised to a single storage site, C-40, in Chaguaramas.

Since 2010 after so many years of that anachronistic system, the situation had begun to change.

For nearly all of my threeplus decades as a consultant physician at the hospital, we had fought for the decentralisation of the procurement and supply of pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies and equipment for the health sector. The People’s National Movement (PNM) would not budge in its rampant backwardness.

Such centralisation meant that if one of the few old trucks at C-40 could not start on a morning that delivery to the SFGH was planned, it meant that your supply was rescheduled to some unknown time in the future. The PNM had singlehandedly created a “cargo- cult” at hospital.

At times these trucks would leave with vital supplies that seemed to have disappeared en route to the hospital and no one could say which ghost spirited it away.

Good sense began to prevail, and an incremental degree of decentralisation thankfully began to creep into the system between 2011 and 2015, to the point that (halleluiah) medicines and supplies, at last, began arriving promptly. Not only that, but the Regional Health Authorities seemed to be finally doing what the system meant them to be doing, ie, competing internally with each other.

Massive drug disappearances seemed to have been minimised.

Believe it or not, lowly poor people were getting drugs in the public health sector that I would hardly have dreamt that any government in this country would buy. And they were getting these drugs in a timely manner.

Then in came the PNM once more in 2015 singing “Bring back de ole time days”. Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh put in a reverse gear and sent the nation back to Nipdec and 1978.

When Deyalsingh informed the public via the media that the public should be “patient” and that the supply of vital drugs would be arriving “next month,” I was jettisoned into a realm of despair. I said, Oh God, what he means is that we would all be “patients” in 30 days.

My mind went straight back to the bad old days of 1978 and had I not immediately recalled that things had changed for the better between 2010 and 2015 and that they still can, I swear that I might have been overwhelmed with pure hopelessness.

I wonder whether Deyalsingh is aware that a sick man cannot wait for 30 days for life-saving medications? I hesitate to say that his thinking epitomises the kind of mindset that held oversight of the heavy burden that had been on the backs of this poor population under the guidance of the PNM for some 44 years all told.

How can a man who ministers to restoring the health of sick and dying people tell them to hold strain for 30 days? Death is a timeless monster from a different realm.

There is a sick joke today that the owners of funeral homes in Trinidad have changed to “dead” the last word in the line in the “Our Father” prayer which goes, “give