Supporting role for the private sector

Although Caribbean Community (Caricom) governments, Barbados’ included, must remain in the driver’s seat of the region’s health care delivery system, the private sector must be a key partner in the provision of care.And its role should include providing sophisticated technology that boosts access and improves the quality of care, both of which would reduce the need for ailing West Indians to go abroad for expensive life-saving health services.That’s according to Dr Edward Greene, CARICOM’s assistant secretary general for Human and Social Development, who told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY in New York that there was room for more private public sector partnerships in health.“The private sector in the Caribbean over the last decade has really been a vital health partner,” he said. “Of course the private sector, being the private sector, introduces a cost dynamic into health care that sometimes isn’t affordable for the common man and women. Drain on public purse“The partnership of the private sector with the public sector is one of ensuring that advanced technologies are available to people in the region which would militate against their having to seek, as we do now, such high rates of services from medical facilities abroad. This is another drain on the public purse as well as on individual finances. “The private sector is important in so far as it can advance the access to the newer technologies and treatment regimes.”In a wide-ranging conversation on health, Dr Greene said that in the end it was government taxpayer-financed services that were the pillars of the health care system throughout the Caribbean.GuidelinesDetailed expert studies conducted in the region, the senior CARICOM official explained, had shown that governments must be at the helm because they managed “the link between health and economics” and that in turn provided the “guidelines” for private sector intervention.“While the private sector could facilitate and complement, the leadership role in public health – in terms of public health surveillance, outbreak of diseases, information communication, education of the public, the links between health and the food system, between health and sport – really belongs squarely in the hands of the public sector,” was the way he put it. “Therefore the partnerships must revolve around those complementary economic factors, like the private sector ensuring that health benefits are provided and being capable of assisting the public sector in the prevention and implementation of certain things.”For example, he saw businesses playing an essential role in helping Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Antigua, St Kitts-Nevis and other states cope with the rising incidence of non-communicable diseases.They can do so, he says, through private and public sector partnerships that provide sporting facilities, parks and other recreational amenities so the “public [can] engage in physical activity” rather than continue “excessive, sedentary” lifestyles characterised by driving cars.