JAMAICA’S public bodies are suffering from a dangerous culture of weak accountability and poor oversight, according to veteran attorney Howard Mitchell, who has warned that the resulting trust deficit is damaging public confidence in national institutions.

Mitchell, who chairs the Government-appointed Institutional Review Committee examining governance failures at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI), said the problems identified at the hospital are not isolated but reflect wider systemic weaknesses across the public sector.

He pointed to chronic non-compliance, weak monitoring and inadequate enforcement of rules as key factors allowing governance failures to persist across multiple state entities.

“Most of them are, I believe it’s something like 12 of the 156 public bodies that are, for instance, current and up-to-date with their returns and reports under the PBMA (Public Bodies Management and Accountability Act),” Mitchell said, highlighting the scale of the compliance problem across Government institutions.

The review committee was convened in response to the Auditor General’s 2025 report into procurement and governance at the UHWI, but Mitchell made it clear that the findings exposed broader structural issues within Jamaica’s public administration framework.

He argued that one of the key reasons for persistent governance failures is that oversight agencies themselves lack the resources and capacity to effectively monitor public bodies.

“So part of the problem and part of why this has occurred is because the monitoring agencies have not been sufficiently resourced and have not been sufficiently staffed and trained to help these boards operate. The Auditor General’s Department itself has resource constraints that limit follow-up oversight, so they have to touch and go. The compliance units within the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service also require greater resourcing and motivation to deepen the reach and support of the culture change that not only the hospital needs but indeed all of the public bodies,” he added.

Mitchell said the scale of the problem is compounded by the sheer number of entities under Government supervision, making effective oversight even more difficult.

“If you look at how the public bodies structure exists within the various ministries, you have ministries that have 24 public bodies to monitor and to ensure that compliance is effective. The prime minister himself has 39 agencies reporting to him,” he said.

He further revealed that some public bodies have gone decades without submitting required reports, raising serious concerns about accountability for public funds.

“Some of the agencies, these public bodies, one in particular, and I won’t name it, but one in particular has not submitted a report for 50 years, not since its inception, so you don’t know what it is doing with the public money. That is untenable and especially where we have achieved such great success with our macroeconomic management,” he added.

He also warned that these systemic failures are contributing to a wider erosion of trust between citizens and the State, particularly when public bodies fail to deliver on their mandates.

“I think the political stakeholders may have finally recognised that part of the root cause of that trust deficit is the difference between promise and delivery. When they fail in that role, the feedback is immediately on the politicians. It is immediately on the institutions of politics, and it damages the society,” Mitchell said.

Within this context, the UHWI has been positioned as a critical test case for broader reform, with the committee recommending that the Government bring in external expertise to help drive change at the institution.

“We do not have, in my humble personal opinion, the level of expertise available here in Jamaica in relation to teaching hospitals and the management of teaching hospitals and the kind of unique animal that the University Hospital is,” he said.

He said the committee is recommending that the Government retain an independent international change-management expert to guide the hospital’s transformation, develop a structured implementation plan and ensure accountability for results.

Meanwhile, Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton endorsed the recommendation, indicating that the Government intends to seek expertise from outside Jamaica to support the reform process.

“I also take the position that I am not sure that that firm exists in Jamaica. So we will go to the international market to identify where that experience exists around teaching and service delivery hospitals, to guide the process over time,” Tufton said.

Mitchell stressed that while the focus is currently on UHWI, the issues identified should serve as a wake-up call for reform across all public bodies.

“It’s a good point to start with the hospital, but it shouldn’t be the end of the road. It should be an example by which we pull up the standards of the other public bodies,” he said.