Looming healthcare fallout – surgeon
THE COVID-19 pandemic has left a wave of devastation in its wake and changed the values of the Jamaican society, so much so that a major reset in values will be required to clean up the mess in education and health, among other areas, as the country adjusts to a new normal, according to a senior medical doctor.
Dr Alfred Dawes made the forecast last Thursday while addressing a virtual meeting of the Lion’s Club of Kingston. He said mental health, which is often ignored, was one area that showed significant fallout.
“There was a survey that showed that almost everybody had some form of depression or anxiety during the last years, and that is [because] we were isolated. Humans are social creatures, we couldn’t congregate as much as we would have liked to, so we fell into a state of depression, some of us. The problem with depression is that you cannot use your depressed mind with the chemical changes to always diagnose yourself, because the mind is affected already,” Dawes warned.
“It is usually someone else around you who will notice those changes. But if you do, or some else does, then now is the time to get help,” he urged. “You are not weak if you want to get therapy, or even if it requires some pharmaceutical intervention. But a depressed mind cannot heal itself on its own, because there are actual changes within the brain that have to be depressed, outside of your capacity to pull yourself out. You may come out on your own, but it may be longer, and you suffer needlessly when there are avenues that are available to be used.”
The setback in health was particularly significant, according to the medical doctor, and getting back on track will be a major problem, since many lives and livelihood have been severely affected. He noted that before COVID, the waiting time for simple surgical procedures, such as treating a hernia or removing a gall bladder, was upwards of three years. Since then, with the closure of clinics and COVID patients being given priority attention over the last two years, this has led to even more patients having a longer wait for their surgeries.
AFFECTING LIVES
“That is going to be a major problem, because it is affecting persons’ lives and livelihoods. Everything was all about COVID, but the farmer with a hernia cannot work efficiently because of the pain. And then you run the risk of complications and worsening – gallstones can move and cause jaundice and inflammation of the pancreas. Hernias can get stuck, requiring surgery; and then you look at other chronic diseases.”
Still, things could get worse, according to Dr Dawes, as he turned the spotlight on non-communicable diseases.
“The clinics have also been curtailed to deploy the staff elsewhere, and that means less diabetics have been treated; their conditions are worse off now. Hypertension – half of Jamaicans who have high blood pressure don’t know that they have high blood pressure, and, usually, when they get into the clinic is when they start to treat it, but that was one of the things that fell by the wayside as well.
“So, we have more persons with chronic diseases who had suboptimal treatment over the last two years, and that is a very long time for diseases that are progressive. Cancer, in particular, we don’t know how many persons have advanced cancer because their cancers were not picked up early, their biopsies not done in a timely manner, or surgeries completed to remove the tumour so they could start their therapy,” he warned.
According to Dawes, patients with chronic diseases really suffered and hardly had a voice because the general population, as well as those in the medical fields, were so focused on COVID.
“It was the tree that was right in front of us, and we didn’t look wholesomely at the forest. But even if we did, what could we do, given the circumstances?
“So now that we are at a stage where we are not in pandemic mode, we are in the endemic mode, we have to remember all of those persons and realise that we have to double down in our efforts to get healthcare to them, to prevent their diseases progressing to even worse stages.”