YET ANOTHER of the serious challenges facing the public health sector in Jamaica, that of the shortage of specialist doctors, requires urgent but carefully- thought out attempts at a solution.The problem is that while some 80 junior doctors graduate each year from the medical school of the University of the West Indies, many of these graduates who were trained with heavy state subsidies in the most expensive programme, migrate to developed countries.
Dr. Trevor McCartney, senior medical officer at the Kingston Public Hospital, in noting recently that plans were afoot by the Ministry of Health to employ up to 300 additional doctors, many of them specialists, in the health service over the next 10 years or so, explained that the current system does not allow for the majority of the doctors graduating annually to remain in the country.
On top of the old salary issue and the difficult conditions of work in the resources-starved government medical service, Dr. McCartney has pointed to the serious migration push factor - the extent of which the public might not have been aware.
So at the moment, patients for non-emergency surgery have to be waiting for inordinately long periods. And even regular visits to the various specialist clinics of the public hospitals are an exercise in patient endurance like Job's.
Indications are that of the 80 or so junior doctors who graduate each year, only 30 can be accepted into post-graduate training programmes. And this is primarily because there is a shortage of posts at the University Hospital and the various hospitals in the public health service.
To complicate the matter, most of the doctors who are trained as specialists are not able to gain employment in Jamaica because there are too few posts in the public medical service.
This chicken and egg conundrum of training and employment means that the efficiency in our public health system is compromised.
While the move to create more posts in the medical service will bring welcome relief to patients who have had to cope not only with their illness but the psychological trauma imposed by the inefficiency in the system, greater effort has to be made to retain the numbers necessary for meeting our own domestic needs.
This means that more resources will have to be channelled specifically into putting in place the facilities to attract and retain teaching staff. And while there will always be the pull for our well-trained doctors to go elsewhere where they can be better compensated and find more sophisticated equipment with which to work, we need not make the migration path more attractive by frustrating the desires of those who want to work in the system locally.
