New southside clinic opens for N.H.I.
While the airwaves may be full of catchy slogans telling us to “try N.H.I.”, the pilot public health programme is only now getting ready for implementation. According to Doctor Marcelo Coyi of Belize Medical Associates, they will soon be opening a clinic on Regent Street for residents of the city’s southside. Coyi spoke to News 5 about how the free services will be administered.
Dr. Marcelo Coyi, B.M.A. Southside Clinic
“We will be offering what we call integrated health care for all the people on the south side who have a Social Security number. And by that I mean we’ll be giving preventive care, curative care, rehabilitative care, and also it involves apart from the clinical care or the primary care, we will also be involved in giving lab X-ray, ultra sound, and pharmacy services.”
Jose Sanchez
“Medical Associates is on the north side, how did you get involved in the southside project?”
Dr. Marcelo Coyi
“What has happened is that earlier on, there was a bidding for the opening of private health care facilities to do primary health care for the project, and we are one of the people who successfully bided to open up a primary health care clinic.”
Jose Sanchez
“This project is to see whether or not it would work for the entire country, how do you find out if it is functioning properly?”
Dr. Marcelo Coyi
“Well this is the first time that the private sector is going to be involved in such a project, at the same time the public sector is being doing the same thing. We will have several performance appraisals at the end of the project and it involves several factors. One of them involves patient satisfaction, two, the quality of nursing that we have, the quality of doctors that we have, the level of infrastructure that we have. Based upon all these factors we’ll be appraised whether we have satisfactorily provided the services that are expected of a primary health care facility.”
Coyi says that he expects the clinic to be up and running during the next few weeks. Though the southside pilot project is free of cost, the full national programme will require contributions from both employers and employees.
