By KHRISNA RUSSELL

Deputy Chief Reporter

krussell@tribunemedia.net

HEALTH Minister Dr Duane Sands said yesterday the government is still trying to decide what it can afford to do regarding the homeless patients who are lodged at the Princess Margaret Hospital.

He said following an evaluation of the “heartbreaking” problem several months ago, the government now knows there are several options which include building a facility for the patients or subsidising existing facilities to care for them.

This issue is one of great expense to the government, reaching a whopping $7m each year, Dr Sands has told The Tribune.

His comments came after The Tribune exclusively revealed the plight of the long-term boarders, four of whom are children, who appear to have fallen through the cracks.

There are 28 boarders presently at PMH costing the public hospital more than $15,000 a day.

Repeated calls were made to Social Services Minister Lanisha Rolle, however she could not be reached for comment yesterday.

However, when he was contacted, Press Secretary Anthony Newbold told The Tribune Mrs Rolle instructed the director of Social Services to look into the issue.

Dr Sands said: “What we have done is we have properly and objectively looked at the problem. When we did the evaluation a few months ago it was anticipated that these boarders cost us about $7m a year.

“Now in order to move them out of the hospital they would have to be moved to an appropriate facility that would provide them with the type of support that they would need. You can’t just put them out on the street. Some of the nursing homes are not adequate in terms of the skill sets they provide.

“So what we are trying to do is determine what it is that we can afford to do because either you would have to create your own facility and staff it with patient care technicians or some nursing staff or whatever or you would have to provide a subsidy to these other homes in order to provide the services that these people need because you don’t want them bouncing back and forth from the hospital because we don’t have the level of nursing home care that we could just do it tomorrow.”

He continued: “Nor do we have (a) line item in the budget that says we got three million that we can spend to provide that subsidised care.

“The opportunity is there, but in order to benefit from that opportunity you need the funds to do it and so what we are trying to do is identify where those funds are. But the impact on the ordinary Bahamian and the ordinary patient is huge.

“Because in addition to beds being occupied by boarders, we also have beds out of commission because of construction. So between the two of them, that’s a hundred beds or as much as 20 per cent of the total beds of the hospital.

“This is a chronic problem. This is not a problem that just started last week or last month or last year. It’s heart breaking, but it is a consequence of the challenges in our country.”

Several current boarders have been at the hospital for as long as five years; however nursing staff provided several accounts of persons that were interned as infants and left as teenagers.

It is a phenomenon that also calls into question the efficacy of state-run social services, which work closely with the hospital to manage cases, but are largely unsuccessful.

“This topic is a controversial topic,” Principal Nursing Officer Valerie Miller told The Tribune last week.

“It’s not one that the public is keen on hearing because it casts some aspersions on them to some extent, but PMH is really plagued by what we deem boarders. Boarders in our setting are those persons who would have come in to seek medical attention, and at the completion of their treatment the physician deemed it was fit for them to return home.

“These persons would not have been collected and discharged and hence they remain with us and we refer to them as boarders. Many of them are not on treatment and some of them are like many persons who take tablets at home every day so just taking medication is no indication to be in hospital. We have boarders ranging from one-month-old to 84 years.”

She added: “This would be something that’s in the society and the society has changed and some persons truly have nowhere to go. We always do our assessment, a complete physical assessment and history taken on the patient, and sometimes you have your antennas going up at the very beginning that this is a potential problem.”

Nurse Miller spoke to The Tribune during its investigation into reports that there were several young children who were living at the hospital indefinitely. Presently there are four children: two infants, a five-year-old, and an 11-year-old.

Some 15 years ago, the hospital utilised a school bus to take school-aged boarders to and from school; nowadays, Nurse Miller said there is a trained teacher onsite to ensure that children are able to keep up with the curriculum while receiving long-term treatment.

However, she told The Tribune that there has been no change in how boarders are managed by the state since then.