There are no perfect health care systems, but the Virgin Islands’ planned National Health Insurance programme has the potential to be one of the good ones, Dr. Joel Stevens said this week.
Dr. Stevens is the senior attending surgeon at Providence Hospital in Washington, DC. He’s also a Virgin Islander and a member of the BVI Health Services Authority Board, who returns to the territory to consult at Peebles Hospital.
Giving the annual Frederick Pickering Memorial Lecture at H. Lavity Stoutt Community College Tuesday evening, he shared some of his “Lessons Learned in Healthcare on a 50-Year Journey from Home.”
One key change will be to get hospital leadership to reconnect with the “working people,” Dr. Stevens said.
“This is something we’ve already started to do,” he said. “Leadership means well, but we’re just now discovering that some of the policies are not healthy.”
For example, he explained, policies in the past have inadvertently led to a high turnover of staff. This, in turn, leads to a lower quality of care, because physicians and nurses know less about their patients’ history.
See the Jan. 30, 2014 edition for full coverage.
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