The Tribune

By LYNAIRE MUNNINGS

Tribune Staff Reporter

lmunnings@tribunemedia.net

FREE National Movement Chairman Dr Duane Sands has attacked the Davis administration for the delay in completing renovations to the Princess Margaret Hospital’s Accident and Emergency Department, allegedly neglecting to provide animal feed to farmers for eight weeks, and outsourcing the parliamentary registration process to a foreign firm.

Last month, Health and Wellness Minister Dr Michael Darville said renovations to PMH’s A&E department would be completed by early November, blaming delays on poorly structured contracts and oversight by the previous administration. However, with the month nearly over, there has been no update on the project’s status.

“It appears as if all of these millions and billions of dollars that they’re bragging about, that they’re collecting are going to places other than to the health care system,” Dr Sands said.

He also criticised the treatment of the hospital’s kitchen, which has been under renovation for six months, leaving it without proper equipment to prepare hot meals for patients. He said patients are currently receiving only boxed meals.

“At that same hospital, if you walk up one hallway and go down the next, you will go to a kitchen which has been gutted, no stove, no fridge, no ability to cook hot meals at all for any of the patients for the last six months,” he said.

“So if you are a patient at Princess Margaret Hospital, you will get a box lunch, a box breakfast and a box dinner.” 

He added that the hospital’s kitchen staff has been relocated to the University of The Bahamas, where meals are prepared and transported to the hospital. He warned of the risk this posed, especially in a weather-related crisis.

“This stopgap measure may have worked for a day or a week, but six months is absolutely unacceptable,” he said.

Dr Sands also accused the government of neglecting the agricultural sector, citing a nationwide shortage of animal feed that has left many farmers with starving livestock, forcing some to euthanise their animals. He said the government had failed to provide the necessary support for farmers over the past eight weeks.

Additionally, Dr Sands criticised the government for reportedly outsourcing the parliamentary registration process to a foreign firm and failing to confirm a parliamentary commissioner.

“As I understand, they have now outsourced, I am advised, the parliamentary registration process to a foreign firm and they’ve already paid the fee,” he said. “Let me just ask them to deny it or to confirm it publicly. 

“How is it,” he asked, “that something so sacred as our democracy, the management of the electoral process, that your new day administration would feel ought to be taken out of the hands of Bahamians and put in the hands of foreigners to manage?”