Saint Lucia’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Sharon Belmar-George, has underscored the need for national health standards in every service.
She indicated that the standards would ensure objective performance monitoring.
Belmar-George spoke at a Health Ministry stakeholder consultation last week.
The two-day event reviewed the National Medical Laboratory Policy Legislation and Regulations.
But there were concerns.
“An honest assessment of our health care system identifies some critical gaps that need urgent attention,” a Health Ministry release quoted the CMO saying.
Belmar-George disclosed that physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and allied health practitioners are regulated and licensed.
However, she explained that, except for pharmacists, the institutions in which they operate are not regulated or licensed.
Belmar-George spoke of the need to ensure an acceptable standard of health care in Saint Lucia linked to safety, best practices, efficiency, and client-centered care.
She explained that developing a policy to govern all services is often necessary to achieve acceptable healthcare standards for medical practices, diagnostic centers, allied health, and laboratories in the private and public sectors.
Madam CMO, I could not have agreed with you more. Standards are the way forward.
You people in health care admin here make a career of defending incompetence within your ranks and scorn those with standards. Don’t get me started with you hippocrites.
For centuries, the Hippocratic Oath has been sworn to by physicians, whereby specific ethical standards for patient care were upheld, with particular focus on doing no evil, and maintaining medical confidentiality.
Now, the goal of modern physicians is to increase profits for pharmaceutical companies & to increase remuneration for themselves.
Hence, all medical standards currently being promoted, seek to usurp a patient’s autonomy over his/her health, replacing it with a mandate of exorbitant profits for an increasingly authoritarian medical industry!
CMO – Belma you have a job to do and from all accounts you have been doing a great job. Don’t worry about any distractors; BTW stay as beautiful as you are.
Before we talk about health standards, how about if we complete the St Jude’s hospital ….
@ HN :- by saying the St. Jude’s Hospital, I hope you are also including the modern Hospital started by the last administration. I don’t think there’s a Doctor in the world who wouldn’t want to work in a modern Hospital with all the modern Technology out there. After spending $millions on an old health Center turned something they term a Hospital and even an old run down Stadium, the division between the two political Parties is staggering. Lord put a hand against racism and hate.
I appreciate the concern with standards. Ultimately we can have Accreditation of health care institutions in the Caribbean.