Yahneake Sterling, Staff Reporter

Minister of Health Horace Dalley yesterday said the regional health authorities would not be dismantled despite calls by some medical professionals for this to happen.

"We will not abolish the regional health authorities ... We need to do a further review of the decentralisation, but certainly not abolish it," Mr. Dalley argued.

The review was commissioned by the Services Commission in response to concerns levied by medical personnel.

Last week, Dr. John Hall, immediate past president of the Medical Association of Jamaica (MAJ), said of the regional health authorities: "They are a menace to the delivery of good health service. They are a costly bureaucracy who are not delivering and simultaneously creating a budgetary block to the delivery of appropriate health care of the doctors so trained to do."

Highlighting conditions

Dr. Hall's comments were made at a press conference to highlight the deplorable conditions at the Victoria Jubilee Hospital, the largest maternity hospital in the English-speaking Caribbean.

However, the Health Minister said that the ministry would not return to the days when everything that needed to be addressed had to go through the ministry's head office.

The review of the structure is scheduled to be completed by year-end. A review of the regional health authorities was first conducted in 2001 and then again in 2003.

According to Grace Allen-Young, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health, following the study in 2003, the plan was to allow the regions to devolve the responsibility to the hospitals in a timely manner to allow them to function as they were intended.