Bodoe: Govt to assess medical equipment at all RHAs

Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­[email protected]

Min­is­ter of Health Dr Lack­ram Bo­doe has lament­ed the lack of ad­e­quate med­ical equip­ment to ef­fec­tive­ly serve the pub­lic, not­ing that such chal­lenges were one of sev­er­al is­sues the Gov­ern­ment is work­ing to ad­dress, as he re­called in­stances where dif­fer­ent clin­ics would have to share a de­vice.

Dr Bo­doe high­light­ed the is­sue while ad­dress­ing the 12th an­nu­al con­fer­ence of the Ra­di­o­log­i­cal So­ci­ety of Trinidad and To­ba­go (RSTT) on Sun­day, where he re­flect­ed on the im­por­tance of the in­te­gra­tion of tech­nol­o­gy in med­ical analy­ses and the de­vel­op­ment of these tools in help­ing med­ical pro­fes­sion­als to di­ag­nose and care for their pa­tients.

Re­fer­ring to his past ex­pe­ri­ence as a ward of­fi­cer at the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal in the mid 1980s, Dr Bo­doe said the tech­niques and tests used for di­ag­no­sis were dif­fer­ent from what were avail­able to­day, not­ing that ul­tra­sound equip­ment was not wide­ly avail­able for use.

He lament­ed, how­ev­er, that while the de­vices were in Trinidad and To­ba­go, ef­forts were un­der­way to en­sure such crit­i­cal de­vices were more read­i­ly avail­able, cit­ing chal­lenges he saw first­hand dur­ing a vis­it to the ma­ter­ni­ty ward of the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal last month.

"An ul­tra­sound ma­chine in the of­fice of an OBG­YN is akin to a stetho­scope for a car­di­ol­o­gist and of course our women de­serve bet­ter. And that re­al­ly should be state of the art.

"It's the in­ten­tion of the Gov­ern­ment, of course, to try and make ul­tra­sound scan­ning avail­able not on­ly in the labour ward, but in the gy­nae­co­log­i­cal and an­te­na­tal clin­ics and so on, so we are go­ing for­ward. We still have a lot to do in that re­gard.

"Just two Sun­days ago I toured the ma­ter­ni­ty de­part­ment at the PoS hos­pi­tal and they're still strug­gling for the use of one ul­tra­sound amongst the clin­ics and wards and so on, so that's some­thing we need to look at."

To gauge the avail­abil­i­ty of this equip­ment and oth­ers, Bo­doe an­nounced that a tech­ni­cal team would be formed and de­ployed to all Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties (RHAs) to ac­count for how much med­ical in­stru­ments were avail­able and whether they were work­ing.

He said this ex­er­cise would be in­valu­able in strength­en­ing the ef­fi­cien­cies of the pub­lic health sys­tem.

"There are a lot of things that need fix­ing in our hos­pi­tals. Some of our plants are old, some are very new, and it is my in­ten­tion in the very near fu­ture - mean­ing per­haps in the next cou­ple of weeks - to send a tech­ni­cal team to all of the RHAs, to all of our in­sti­tu­tions, start­ing with the old­est of the in­sti­tu­tions first."

Bo­doe, how­ev­er, main­tained that there were still sev­er­al pieces of new equip­ment avail­able at the Cen­tral Block of the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal and the Cou­va Chil­dren's Hos­pi­tal, for which work was be­ing done to en­sure they were ready for use.