P.U.P. Leader Calls for Head of Minister of Health

Francis Fonseca

By now, a video showing a large rat inside a sterile incubator at the Western Regional Hospital just after it bit a newborn has gone viral. Even before that, the images of rats infiltrating the pantry and storage room at the hospital made everybody feel sick and disgusted.  And even those unbelievable scenarios perhaps pales in comparison to the terribly tragic story of Nolberta Sanchez, who died after a routine C-section was performed at the Western Regional Hospital last week. There is another report of a young woman from Punta Gorda, nineteen year old Lucila Cal, whose recent death at the hospital has come under scrutiny. Actually, the complaints about the health system aren’t limited to the facility in Belmopan, but have come from across the country. For that reason, P.U.P. Leader, Francis Fonseca, today called on Prime Minister Dean Barrow to immediately sack his Minister of Health.

Francis Fonseca, P.U.P. Leader

“We’ve said it over and over we’ve said it we have been very consistent in saying that we need to take the health of this nation very seriously. The Prime Minister of this country had to get serious; we can no longer have somebody who is incompetent, like Pablo Marin heading the Ministry of Health and a C.E.O. Peter Allen who seems to be completely out of touch. We have to deal with that issue, we have to hold the PM responsible, he is the one who put Pablo Marin there and it is clear to everybody within the Ministry of Health, within the Health sector, all the practitioners within the health sector, all of these people realize that this man has no clue in running the Ministry of Health. So, I don’t want to overstate what took place because we have rats all over the country but certainly we can empathize with the family, with the workers there, it’s just a tragic situation, the poor mother I heard the her husband on the newscast last evening, clearly devastated , those young children growing up without a mother. We don’t know the circumstances; we have so many good medical practitioners in this country so I can’t speak on whether there was negligence or not, I can’t speak on that but certainly it was a tragic lost and we continue to hear, I hear these stories all the time from our people in rural communities who have to travel late at night to get access to healthcare we have to do better, we have to do better for our people and I think that it will be a very good signal for the country that the government and the PM is serious about addressing this issue if he deals with Pablo Marin who is the face of the incompetence at the Ministry of Health.”