Just under two years ago, Senator Charles Sinclair Jr, with fire and brimstone-like fervour, championed the enforcement of the Maintenance Act, under which adult children can be legally forced to maintain their abandoned parents and/or grandparents.

Around this time of year, Dr Christopher Tufton, the health and wellness minister, ritually calls on Jamaicans not to abandon their relatives in hospital, tepidly threatening to take them to court if they do.

Local Government and Community Development Minister Mr Desmond McKenzie has not been any less passionate in urging Jamaicans not to shirk their responsibility to their indigent parents.

Apparently too many Jamaicans are not listening to any of these goodly gentlemen. And if the now well-established trend shows up again this year, the number of abandoned people in hospitals, otherwise dubbed “social cases” or “social patients”, will jump again.

It is an issue which comes up on the public chat box every now and again when we are reminded, as in the case of this Sunday Observer’s story by Ms Tamoy Ashman, about a 61-year-old man who has been a resident of Kingston Public Hospital for the last two years.

Forcing children to take care of their aged parents or grandchildren, assuming that they are in a position so to do, will be, at best, easier said than done. For good or for bad, children don’t get to choose their biological parents, and it’s a bit more than obvious that many would quickly pick someone else to be their father or mother if they had the choice.

The story of Jamaica is littered with men and women, but mostly men, who can often be seen roaming the streets, living in State-run infirmaries, or abandoned in public hospitals because their children either can’t or are unwilling to shoulder the responsibility for their welfare.

One of the popular narratives is that the men in their youth abandoned their own children and when they fall upon hard times, in their old age, their angry and bitter offspring want nothing to do with them.

In 2021, Mr Sinclair, the then deputy Senate president, counted an estimated 200 people who had been discharged that year but were still staying at hospitals after relatives failed to pick them up.

Some were abandoned for several years at a cost of almost $408.6 million annually to the Government for covering nurses, doctors, social workers, nursing assistants, medication, accommodation, meals, toiletries, and personal care.

Dr Tufton recently rehashed plans to put the matter back on the front burner through the courts, saying that his ministry had sought the advice of the attorney general to determine how best to approach the problem of social patients, but admitted it was a hot-button issue.

It is never going to be an uncomplicated business to hold children responsible for maintaining parents who either abandoned them, abused them, or in any other way failed to lay a solid foundation for their future well-being.

We expect that it is one of those matters that legislation will never be able to resolve, and will, at the best of times, be very hard to enforce. Moral suasion seems to be the more appropriate approach.

The Government might do better to seek to expand infirmaries to house social cases from public hospitals, even though we are aware it is a more expensive venture.