Mia: BAMP dispute ‘unfortunate’

MIA MOTTLEY says if she was Prime Minister of Barbados, she would have met with the Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners  (BAMP) day and night to resolve the impasse between them and the Board of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.Mottley, the Opposition Leader and long-standing member for St Michael East, told a Press conference on Saturday that the dispute was unfortunate.She said that BAMP had legitimate concerns and had chosen to take a path to protect those cases which they believed to be life-threatening.“I believe that the whole episode is unfortunate and if I were there, I would have to be meeting with them all day and night such that the circumstances of regularity can obtain back at the hospital.“This is not a matter that can wait until Monday (today) for discussions. This is not a matter that can wait for a Minister to go off on vacation and return. “This is a matter that should have been the subject  of bringing all the parties together to get back a situation of normalcy as a matter of urgency from Friday lunchtime when it was clear that an industrial impasse was at hand,” she said.Mottley was of the view that Governments were not the ideal entities to manage health care institutions.“We have to have a coalition of health care professionals as well as representation from the patients perspective, be at the centre of the management of medical institutions in this country.“The truth is that the bureaucracy of Government, and we tried to allay some of it when we created the Board, but unfortunately this Government seems to be running the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Board as if it is still a department of the ministry and that is where the problems come,” she said.The Opposition Leader thinks that more might have to be done  to place distance between management of the hospital and the ministry of health.“We may well be coming to the point where the Government should simply accept what is the per capita costs of the treatment of patients in the hospital, placed a cap on it  and provide that money without seeking to get into the finer details of the management of the hospital on a day to day basis and leave it to the health care professionals to do.”