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Brebnor urges Tobagonians to use health centres

THA Secretary of Health, Wellness and Social Protection Dr Faith Brebnor is encouraging Tobagonians to utilise health centres where possible, as the emergency mode at the Scarborough General Hospital has been lifted. The Scarborough General Hospital officially exited the mode on July 11, following a 48-hour intervention period​. On July 8, the Tobago Regional Health Authority (TRHA) in a press release said the hospital had activated emergency mode owing to what it called a “surge in patient admissions and capacity constraints across medical and surgical wards.” Speaking on the Tobago Updates morning show on July 14, Brebnor brought some clarity to the issue, noting that the world including TT remains traumatised coming out of the covid19 pandemic as prior to the pandemic, no one cared about what happened in the healthcare system. “Coming out of covid, you see something like that and you automatically think – oh my God, the sky is falling, we have another covid happening. But when you actually read what the release said, we were clear – we simply have an increase in people who are presenting at the health facility and what emergency mode allows us to do is to take a little bit of time and level off, balance back.” She said there was a situation where the medical and surgical wards were filled and there were in excess of ten people who needed to be admitted. She said because this was happening, they made a decision to halt all cases that were not critical. She said not all cases are critical and, therefore, if the situation isn’t critical then there is no need to go to the Scarborough General Hospital’s accident and emergency department. “We have all of these other facilities that you can go to so we can free up the staff who are there so they can treat with the patients who are already in the system. We can do some discharging, we can send some back to their health centres, we can send some to Roxborough because they don’t actually need to be at Scarborough.” She said hence a 48-hour emergency mode. “We took the two days, we figured it out, we did the maneouvering and then we decided okay let’s open back up, we can continue again. But, we are also encouraging you to keep going to Bacolet, Canaan and Roxborough for example – if the thing that you are treating with does not require accident and emergency kind of service, so we do not get back to this point.” She added: “Part of what we’re doing is also looking at how the health centres can be restructured so we can also provide more of those services. People behave based on what they know. I am sure in many instances, people tried going to the health centre and when they went to the health centre they couldn’t get the service and had to go to the hospital. So we have to make sure that when we’re sending them to the health centre, the health centre can do what it needs to do.” The post Brebnor urges Tobagonians to use health centres appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.