Tufton launches Compassionate Care programme in St Ann

Minister of Health Dr Christopher Tufton launched his ministry's Compassionate Care programme at the St Ann's Bay Regional Hospital last Thursday, aimed at improving the quality of service and care offered in public hospitals and health centres in Jamaica.

The programme seeks to improve clinical services with a focus on empathetic service delivery in health facilities. The programme will also include recruitment and training of volunteers to assist in providing additional support in administering compassionate care to patients during the recovery process.

The compassionate-care programme comprises three components - training of staff in customer service, improvement of basic infrastructure, and boosting volunteerism to aid the delivery of compassionate care.

Tufton commended the administration at the hospital in its effort to continually improve the facility and stressed that compassionate care is about delivering adequate service.

"Compassionate care is not an exceptional initiative, it's not a desire to be outstanding in terms of what we are expected to do in delivering service with care to our patients; it is, to my mind, a requirement," the minister said. "It should be an essential 101 requirement for every single worker, every single staff member who provides service to the public."

Tufton said it is important to recognise that even where the infrastructure exists, it has to be accompanied by quality service, otherwise the objectives will not be met.

"We are expected to deliver a dose of compassion with the care and the service that we provide, and where it is absent, we undermine the other critical skill sets that we have," the minister pointed out.

Fabia Lamm, regional director for the North East Regional Health Authority, in giving an overview of the programme, said that already, improvement to the infrastructure at the hospital has started, with work being done in several sections of the institution.

"It continues to be a work in progress," Lamm stated. "We have done extensive work at the outpatient department, we put in a central air unit, a digital signage board which give members of the public messages to read and engage in while they wait for service."