Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh says he has taken a position to Cabinet to “put CDAP drugs in the hands of patients” to give the required relief. And while he said this will happen “soon,” he gave no details of how this initiative will work.
But former South West Regional Health Authority chairman, Fyzabad MP Dr Lackram Bodoe, says he “looks forward to the suggestion” and hopes it is “properly monitored.” He described CDAP as “very close to all of us, it is a good programme and it continues to be improved.”
Both men were speaking during debated on the mid-term review yesterday.
Deyalsingh told the Parliament the CDAP programme has $26 million worth of drugs, but when the former government was in power the administrative cost to run the programme was $46 million “and the drugs still not reaching the patients.”
In 2015, the year of the election, Deyalsingh said: “They gave out a $30 million contract to launch the National Health Card and when you gave your name at the pharmacy, the next two days you get a call saying vote for me. That is called Cambridge Analytica.”
Deyalsingh said Government still owes $3 million for the launch of the National Health Card.
Bodoe noted that the National Health Insurance Card is a “very important issue.” He recalled that on Wednesday, when the Ministry of Health appeared before Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, one of the issues which came up was “the fact that it is very difficult to trade and to prevent multiple access by the same patient where you can have hoarding of drugs.”
Bodoe said Health Ministry officials alluded to the committee that “the very card the minister is bad talking will be utilised by the ministry to bring accountability to the administration of the CDAP system.”
On the issue of the Children’s Life Fund, Deyalsingh said he had signed off on four cases. He also advised the Parliament that under his watch, the ministry had brought maternal mortality rates down. He said this country records 17,000 pregnancies a year and 90 per cent of these women are attended to in the public sector and ten per cent in private institutions. He said all the difficult cases which the private sector do not wish to handle they send to the public hospitals.
There are currently, he said, “two women sent to us by the private sector which is touch and go and if something happens the media will say is the public hospital, not knowing the difficult cases that are sent to us that we cannot refuse.”
The Health Minister also paid special tribute to a number of healthcare professionals, including Drs Kelly Sookhoo, Dr Patrick Harnarayan and Dr Ravi Lalla, who performed the 10-hour surgery at the San Fernando General Hospital to reattach the hand of a mother who was recently chopped in an incident at her home. He said, “they did excellent, excellent work.”