Dear Editor,

On Friday, May 27, 2017 I had reason to interact with the public health services at May Pen Hospital. Unfortunately, I’m aware that my experience is not singular, but it’s the normal for many Jamaicans who don’t have the luxury to seek private care. We’ve Band-aided a sore and now this new normal of broken equipment, crumbling infrastructure, the mere resemblance of customer service, and unmotivated patient care is cancerous.Having lost billions to waste and corruption, arguments about limited resources must be shunned; worse, the same people who preside over improper allocation of these resources run abroad to access health care.Some of the glaringly unsatisfactory conditions that I observed at the facility include:• Patients wait extended hours for a bed to be freed from the ward to accommodate admission.• Poor internal processes (no accurate management of the flow of patients)• The area allocated for triage is small, not suited for quick service, and too many wheelchairs cause cramming.• Broken/old equipment just lie around. One bench had a “Don’t sit” sign on it — how about it is just removed if it is defective?• Bathrooms within the observation area are horrible with accessibility issues for the disabled and elderly. Plumbing is as an issue: water ran uncontrollably in one stall, and the other had no water. There was an unsightly scene in the male bathroom of blood everywhere, even the toilet bowl and a bucket were filled with blood.• I’m not certain how duties are assigned, but I witnessed only one nurse checking on patients, even though many more nurses were passing through the treatment area. This unconcern went across not just nurses, but doctors, porters and others.Still, I must salute the good men and women of the May Pen Hospital who try their best to make public health services a better experience. But residents of Clarendon are just as culpable for the current state of such a vital facility. It must be our civic duty to rise to the occasion and contribute towards the development of our parish. I call on the relevant parish leadership; faith-based, youth groups; civil society; the diaspora; and the private sector to summon our collective wills and energies to make improving public health care a parish-level priority. 

Mario Boothe

m.raphael.b@gmail.com