It is no secret that the Virgin Islands’ public healthcare system is struggling, with two community clinics shuttered and other facilities across the territory understaffed, under-equipped and under-resourced.
This month, however, the BVI Health Services Authority took an important step toward addressing such challenges when it launched an eight-year strategic plan.
The document, which was created following stakeholder consultations, is well-conceived. It includes broad-stroke reforms like restructuring the agency’s governance, funding and accountability frameworks.
It also includes specific plans for addressing challenges like understaffing, infrastructure issues, sister-island deficiencies, and many others.
Also listed are output targets that will help leaders and the public track progress and hold the BVIHSA accountable.
Though drafting a multi-year strategy may not seem terribly ground-breaking, even this basic level of planning has often been lacking at most of the territory’s statutory bodies.
This perennial failure is tied to longstanding systemic issues: The agencies have often been so politicised that such plans were probably pointless to produce and impossible to follow given the shifting whims of changing government administrations.
Thankfully, steps to change that paradigm are included in the reforms implemented after the Commission of Inquiry.
For instance, a Statutory Board Policy the government published last June rightly requires each board to produce a “rolling five-to-ten-year strategic plan” approved by Cabinet.
The BVIHSA’s new plan appears to fit the bill. Besides charting a way forward that was decided with input from stakeholders and the wider public, the document will help minimise politicisation by ensuring continuity between government administrations.
The plan will also give the BVIHSA a stronger footing to operate within — and advocate for changes to — a system that clearly needs broader reforms outside the BVIHSA’s remit.
Currently, for instance, the National Health Insurance system doesn’t adequately incentivise patients to use public healthcare services.
Instead, they go private clinics, which reap large NHI pay-outs while the BVIHSA is left in the unenviable position of filling healthcare gaps in less profitable areas such as the sister islands.
The strategic plan should help address such challenges in addition to ensuring that priorities are in place when more funding comes available.
Ultimately, such multi-year strategies will help ensure that statutory boards are allowed to operate independently as they are meant to do.
They will also complement other related reforms, which should include widely advertising board member roles and ending the practice of mass board resignations each time a new government takes power.
Though such reforms may seem clunky, they are the way forward toward better service for all residents.
In the BVIHSA’s case, better healthcare is sure to follow. Kudos to the agency for taking a lead. Other statutory boards should follow suit without delay.
