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And while the Ministry has secured that essential diagnostic tool for the KHMH, they still need help staffing the place.
It's a criticism that the KHMH union has levied when learning of the proposed tertiary care hospital in Belmopan. They reminded the government of its failures to secure personnel for the current national referral hospital and asked how they plan to staff an entirely new facility with the very same personnel needs.
We asked the Minister about it today and here's what he had to say:
Reporter:
"That's a great vision, but the reality is that you cannot staff the KHMH, how are you going to guarantee that you can staff this new hospital, and in talking bout retaining nurses for this country, what is Plan Belize planning to start a new nurse who graduates this year, it can't be $24,000.00?"
Kevin Bernard, Minister Of Health
"As I have said in previous interviews and I will say it again, the human resource in health is critical for us and at the Ministry, we are looking at addressing not just the nurses but our pharmacists, our lab technicians, our bio-techs, all of these things we have to focus on and yes we need to ensure that we have the human resources but we are going to be putting up all our efforts to ensure that we, the doctor to patient ratio, the nurse to patient ratio, we have to do it in a planned approach and so while there may be issues currently, we are also working behind right now at the Ministry in seeing how we can fill some of those gaps that exist within the health system. We have, we know the challenges that we face a lot of these things, we, we, incurred but at the end of the day we need to make sure that we are doing it to bring about a better delivery of health services to the Belizean."
We'll have more from Minister Bernard later in the news...
