The Dangerous Cost of Normalizing a Broken Healthcare System

Every time yuh step foot inna one of we public hospitals, it feel like yuh enter a different world where time stand still and hope start fade away. It reach a point now where if yuh tell a Jamaican seh dem have to wait ten hours inna A&E, dem just shrug dem shoulder and find a piece of bench fi stretch out. We call it 'normal,' but when yuh really look pan the situation, it nuh normal at all. It is a crisis that we wrap up inna pretty paper and pretend seh it acceptable because we used to the struggle.

The corridors dem pack up with people who inna real pain, some a dem lie down pan cardboard or old stretcher because bed space become like gold. You see the nurses and the doctors dem, and yuh can see the tiredness deep inna dem bone. Dem a try dem best, but dem stretch thin like piece of old elastic. Every week, we hear bout another set a healthcare workers who pack dem bag and head off to UK, Canada, or the States. We can't even blame dem, because who want fi work inna a system where yuh have to choose which patient fi save because the oxygen low or the machine dem bruk down?

What really sweet-mouth we is how the big-ups and the people in charge talk like everything under control. Dem give we long speech and promise big building, but when the average man or woman catch a fever or dem pressure jump up, is a different story dem face. We shouldn't have to have 'link' or know somebody who know somebody just fi get a basic scan or fi see a specialist before the year out. Health care is a right, not a favor that the government a do for we.

The danger inna calling this 'normal' is that we stop get angry. We stop demand better because we expect the worst. When a mother lose her pickney because the ambulance neva come in time, or a grandfather pass away inna a hallway without a proper bed, we just shake we head and seh 'a so the thing set.' But why we haffi accept a system that broken down to the core? We people deserve dignity. We deserve a system where when yuh sick, yuh main focus is getting better, not wondering if yuh ago survive the hospital visit itself.

It high time we stop look the other way. The Caribbean have some of the brightest minds inna the world, but if we don't fix the foundation of how we care for we own people, all the brilliance nah go mean nothing. We need fi stop the band-aid solutions and start treat the sickness inna the system properly. Because if we keep calling this crisis 'normal,' then we just setting up the next generation fi inherit the same graveyard behavior we dealing with today.