Our hospital is now to be managed by an accountant, an engineer, a finance manager, a human resources manager, an industrial relations practitioner, and a trained IT person, a lawyer, a doctor, a nurse, a paramedic and someone trained in management operations (whatever that means). The Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Health and the Chief Medical Officer are to be ex-officio members of the new board.
The minister will now appoint all 13 members of the board and none of them can be members of staff of the QEH. The very people who are responsible for the successful operation of the hospital are no longer good enough to have a say on the board. They will no longer be allowed to make any input on policy at board level. They will no longer be allowed to participate in the decision-making process. Their experience and institutional memories will no longer be used to guide the board. Not for them any contribution to the Government's "Rescue Plan".
This backward policy decision by the goodly doctor is both reprehensible and insulting to the professionals at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. But it is all the more so, given the Democratic Labour Party's (DLP) promise in its manifesto to allow "for real participatory democracy in Barbados where public policy is not imposed from the top . . .". If the minister did not read that section, we want him to read this one from a few paragraphs earlier: " . . . Too many Barbadians perceive voting as a waste of time since many parliamentarians have made promises during the election campaigns, which they have not delivered." In fact, it should be required reading for the entire DLP Cabinet.
What is even more amazing is that although QEH is a teaching hospital and part of the Cave Hill Campus Faculty of Medicine, the representatives of the university have been unceremoniously tossed off the board. The baby has been thrown out with the bath water.
Even if the minister did not want to keep the representatives from the Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners, or the Barbados Registered Nurses' Association, or the Chief of Medical Staff, or the Director of Nursing, we can find no logic in his dispensing with the dean of the School of Clinical Medicine and Research.
Even if he saw no value in having representation from the Barbados Association of Retired Persons, or the Christian Council, the Congress of Trade Unions and Staff Associations of Barbados, the Private Sector Agency or the nominee of the principal of the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies, how does he justify a policy that will now cause the focus to be on personalities instead of the wider groups, which they previously represented?
Is his idea of participatory democracy a shopping list of various skill sets? In this regard, we cannot help but recall a verse from our childhood:
Rub-a-dub-dub three men in a tub, And how do you think they got there?
A butcher, a baker a candlestick maker – They all jumped out of a rotten potato!
'Twas enough to make a fish stare.
The minister's odd thought process aside, we wish the men and women that he appoints to the board God's blessing in their endeavours.