KINGSTON, Jamaica – The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) says that it is taking steps to ensure that details of the government’s audit of the public health sector are revealed to the public in the wake of the 19 dead babies.

In a statement yesterday, leader of the Opposition Andrew Holness said that the party is preparing to get the report released under the Access to Information (ATI) Act.

“I believe it is very important that the public is made aware of the exact state of our healthcare system, and we are now preparing to get the report under the Access to Information Act,” Holness said in a statement yesterday.

Opposition MPs participating in the discussions, which followed a statement from Minister of Health Dr Fenton Ferguson to the House of Representatives on Tuesday, called for the immediate release of the audits.

“I am the mother of a premature child…and I am sitting here thinking that, if that child was born July to August this year, that child could have been a dead child…It is not a laughing matter,” Opposition MP, Olivia ‘Babsy’ Grange (Central St Catherine) argued.

“A certain lack of sensitivity is being displayed in this Parliament at this time, when I know many women out there are saying that ‘dem belly bottom a bun dem’. This is not a joking matter,” she added.

Opposition Spokesman on Finance and Planning, Audley Shaw, also told a JLP Prosperity Live function in Portmore on Thursday, that he feels that the government is refusing to release information on the deaths of babies in public health institutions from bacterial infections in the audit.

“I suspect that the report might have had information about the little babies who died, and I am going to Parliament to use the Access to Information Act to get it tabled,” Shaw told the JLP crowd at the Portmore HEART Academy.

He urged the audience not to blame the public health sector employees for the situation, but the government for the lack of disinfectants in the hospitals.

Noting that his youngest daughter, Christiana, weighed only 1.3 pounds after her premature birth six years ago, and could not breathe on her own for almost five months, Shaw said that his “heart goes out to all the parents involved”.

Balford Henry