The compassionate care programme, which was launched at the Black River Hospital in St. Elizabeth on Thursday, September 20, 2019 seeks to begin a process of emphasizing the customer service component of public health and delivering care with compassion. It is a mechanism to ensure that all public health employees begin to enhance, develop, build and strengthen a culture of customer service.
The programme comprises three components including training of staff in customer service and enhancing basic infrastructure such as the accident and emergency areas to ensure that patients wait in areas of comfort with pictorial messages of advice and encouragement. The third component is volunteerism, which seeks to boost partnerships and engage Jamaicans in offering compassionate care with the supervision of staff.
Health delivery must be twinned with compassion; this must resonate in the heart of every healthcare worker. This was the charge given to medical students preparing to enter the health sector by State Minister in the Ministry of Health and Wellness, Hon. Juliet Cuthbert-Flynn, speaking at the Pan American Health Organization’s (PAHO’s) 120th anniversary youth dialogue at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona on Thursday (July 28, 2022).
Learn more about the components of the Programme below and how your volunteer support can help:
The Compassionate Care Programme recognizes the need to build a cadre of health workers that is customer centric. “By this, we mean that our human resources for health policies must reach back as far as the secondary educational system and begin the training of health professionals that never lose their humanity and appetite for empathy in human suffering. We must find opportunities to inculcate more values and systems that allow our people to feel that they are being served in a manner that does not rob them of their humanity or deprive them of their decency,” Dr. Tufton said.
“Our COVID-19 experience has taught us the need to entrench compassion and compassionate care in the health system, so that anyone who does not participate in this culture is left on the periphery as an outlier and not a part of the normal actors, but an anomaly that should be treated and reformed. We must redouble our efforts to train the existing cadre of healthcare workers in delivery care with compassion,” he added.
The programme also includes improvement to the physical infrastructure, facilty equipments and aesthetics of waiting areas of clinics and hospitals.
The Government of Jamaica will spend some $100 million to finance the initial roll-out of the programme in Accident and Emergency departments in 18 hospitals across the island.
We are going to be ramping up this programme right across the waiting areas of hospitals, health centres, and Accident and Emergency departments, are the words of the health Minister Dr. Christopher Tufton.
The Compassionate Care Programme aims to enhance the psychological wellness of patients within the public health system, as a means of promoting speedy recovery.
As such, a component of the programme focuses on the recruitment, training and organising of volunteers to serve within the public health system to provide additional support in administering compassionate care to patients during the recovery process or while they wait for treatment.
To make a donation to NHEF, please contact Courtney Cephas at courtney.cephas@moh.gov.jm or 876 413-0614 or submit your request below.
