MONTEGO BAY, St James — Opposition spokesman on health Dr Morais Guy is maintaining his dissent over the Government’s Code Care programme.

Speaking to the Jamaica Observer during a recent tour of the Cornwall Regional Hospital in this western city, Dr Guy said that the $1.19-billion price tag attached to Code Care could have been utilised to improve the hospitals across the island.

“As it relates to Code Care, I have still maintained that if the minister had that investment in the hospitals in providing the necessary equipment and also the personnel, even to pay the resident doctors more…and pay the nurses more to get into the system, we would have achieved the same thing as getting our Diaspora members to come down,” said Dr Guy.

Code Care was introduced to reduce the backlog of surgeries through the engagement of specialist nurses and support staff, in the form of nursing missions, to support the nursing cadre on short-term engagements of seven or 14 days. The plan was to have nursing missions engaged utilising contacts within the Diaspora and other friendly support personnel.

Under the $1.19-billion project, wait time for elective surgeries should have been cut to less than 180 days while increasing the number of surgeries conducted over the same period by at least 80 per cent.

The programme, which was officially rolled out in western Jamaica with a $70-million price tag, was launched with the participation of four private health facilities — Hospiten Hospital, Montego Bay Hospital and Urology Centre, Baywest, and GWest — before it was expanded to the Corporate Area.

Andrews Memorial Hospital, Medical Associates Hospital, Heart Institute of the Caribbean, and Winchester Surgical and Medical Institute were then included in the programme.

Code Care was launched in September 2022 to tackle 2,000 surgeries in a year. However, the health ministry was unable to hit that mark, as only 630 operations were carried out according to information provided to the Sunday Observer last month. Attempts made to obtain the updated figure were unsuccessful.

Dr Guy, however, stated that he was reliably informed that the programme’s surgery count had surpassed 1,000.

“It was supposed to be a 2,000 goal and there was a time frame, so what we have seen is just basically a little over 50 per cent of the numbers that were to have been done. We still have patients out there who are suffering from the [ailments] that they would have needed to have the correction surgeries done for,” Dr Guy bemoaned.

Referring to the total number of surgeries done under the programme since its inception, Dr Guy told the Sunday Observer that he is concerned that Code Care is not successfully making a dent in the surgery backlogs as was proposed.

“Now, is it that we are not doing the surgeries in the hospitals outside of the Code Care? I am talking about the elective cases — and I suspect so because a lot of the hospitals still have not been given the necessary equipment,” said Dr Guy.

The project was first announced in May 2021 by portfolio Minister Dr Christopher Tufton, who stated that health professionals were being brought in from the Diaspora to assist with the surgeries. In addition, operating theatres were slated to be rehabilitated, while more surgical supplies and tools were to be secured.

At the same time, the Opposition spokesman further argued that several health facilities across the island were being improperly managed and had not benefitted from the rehabilitation plans.

“I spoke about Annotto Bay Hospital some time ago and they still haven’t got a proper air-conditioning unit yet — that is over a year now. KPH [Kingston Public Hospital], despite what the minister is saying, is suffering and they do not have full access to all their operating theatres,” Dr Guy told the Sunday Observer.