Features

Health Care in St. Lucia

The feeling is being widely expressed that the quality of health care in St Lucia is on the decline.

In fact, some people are expressing the view that this is one of the main reasons why “so many people” are dying in our country.

Added to that hospitals are said to be under-equipped with vital pieces of equipment, like dialysis machines, inadequate, non-existent or over-worked.

The public is waiting anxiously for two hospitals, one in the north and the other in the south, to become operational. The new national hospital has been idle for months. What is the reason for this state of affairs?

Do we have our priorities right as far as in proving health care is concerned? What is the real state of our hospitals? Are people dying for want of better health care? Tell us what you think.

Brown……..
Some say that the health care industry, or medical industry, is an aggregation of sectors within the economic system that provides goods and services to treat patients with curative, preventive, rehabilitative, and palliative care but I don’t think this happens here. Do our hospitals provide good treatment? Are the services good? What about the palliative care? Our practitioners and nurses sometimes misdiagnose us and we really don’t educate ourselves about health care.

Julie….
Brown I think they are doing a good job so far in Saint Lucia…those practitioners and nurses we must thank them. My question is why don’t our governments put in place everything that is necessary so health care can be easily accessible.

Bruce Wayne…..
The cost of health care seems to be increasing all the while. The reasons include ‘higher prices for medical services, paying for volume over value, defensive medicine, use of new technologies and treatments without considering effectiveness, and a lack of transparency of information on prices and quality’. It’s like education, the higher the education the more expensive it is. Let’s try to look at it on the good side.

Rob Downey…..
In Saint Lucia government the clinical services provide mainly for cough, cold, flu, wounds, and removal of stitches. Sometimes, I wish we had the British NHS system.

Alice……
The health care field is a very huge one and, therefore, all organizations and society should participate in providing this service.

Zaffewmon…..
A tourist once commented on a travel site that “you need to bring everything you need as the medical care is not good in St Lucia; The Hospital is about 25 mins drive from Cap Estate. Please also make sure you have Travel Health Insurance as the cost of hospital treatment’s Very High on the island. Ambulance service is provided by Fire Service very BASIC the only thing they had on board is Oxygen. I know this from personal experience as a slip on a wet floor and a cut to the head and a one night stay in hospital cost over US$10,000”. Is this really true or is our health care system a big joke? We should focus on how to prevent those types of issues.

Jason B……
But there is a polyclinic in Gros Islet, about ten minutes from Cap Estate. Not sure why this tourist would say the health care is not good here. It’s perfectly fine for most things; it may not look like the US, UK or China but the overall care is great. The doctors and nurses here have the education and equipment to handle just about anything.

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