The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

Primary healthcare services must become better organised, the outgoing Medical Association of the Bahamas (MAB) president said yesterday, adding that Princess Margaret Hospital’s (PMH) emergency room was often filled with patients who did not need to be there.

Dr Wesley Francis, while addressing the Bahamas Insurance Brokers Association’s (BIBA) annual market education seminar on National Health Insurance (NHI), stressed the need to build on the relationship between physician and patient.  

    “We have to prioritise certain things. Our emergency room is filled with people that don’t need to be there, so when you have true emergencies then they don’t get taken care of in a timely fashion,” Dr Francis said.

“We have to organise primary care. It is essential that we start there, that we build on the relationship of the physician and the patient. When we do that and empower the primary care physicians to do so, I think we are going to see a better health outcome in general.”    

Dr Francis acknowledged there are numerous issues that need to be addressed in the public healthcare sector.

“We have a lot of problems in the public sector, but we do a lot of good in the public sector also,” he said. “We don’t have a perfect set up but we can’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

“We have to continue and develop a strategic road map as to how we are going to develop this healthcare

system. We have a  lot of problems we need to address, and we need to have an honest discussion about those problems.”

    The revised NHI Bill was released last week, with the most notable change being the elimination of the mandatory legal requirement for all Bahamians and legal residents to sign up for the scheme.

NHI’s primary healthcare phase was scheduled to be introduced in April. However, last week, Minister of Health Dr Perry Gomez said NHI would “likely” be delayed.