Contractor General to Address Friday Policy Forum

Contractor General, Derrick McKoy will address the question, ‘Are clients satisfied with the measures being implemented to improve public sector service?’, when he speaks at a Friday Policy Forum on February 27, hosted by the Management Institute for National Development (MIND).
He will explore the issues pertaining to service quality and the new ethos of public sector management.
The Forum, which takes place at MIND’s Old Hope Road campus in Kingston, is the 14th in the series.
Mr. McKoy told JIS News that he intended to look at “service quality as a measurement for public service delivery”, and what index or indices should be used to measure the performance within that sector.
He also added that ways should be found to externally assess the organizations. “We need to find ways of assessing these things by some external standard. That is the real challenge I think, and we want to look at that,” he pointed out.
Touching on the establishment of Executive Agencies, one of the government’s highly visible reforms in public sector management, he said that “part of the difficulty we have with these reforms, is that we don’t easily put them in a theoretical context”.
“We know we are making some changes and we believe that we are doing well, but very often theory fails us, and so we have to look to assess what is in fact happening,” he added.
Mr. McKoy, who is an Attorney-at-Law, said he would seek to arrive at broad conclusions at the MIND forum. “We think this is really preliminary work [that] we’re doing now, but we want to make some conclusions as to where we are going,” he said.
Prior to his service as Contractor General, Mr. McKoy held the position of consultant with the Public Sector Reform Group, under Cluster 1 of the Jamaica Public Sector Modernization Project (PSMP).
He has also served as consultant to the Caribbean Export Development Agency in Barbados, on Competition Policy in the Carifora Region, as well as consultant to the Office of Utilities Regulation Implementation Unit in Jamaica.
Mr. McKoy, who has enjoyed a career in the legal field since the late 1970s, when he graduated from the Norman Manley Law School in Kingston, has also benefited from post-graduate legal studies at the University of London, and the University of Toronto.
The Contractor General is the second speaker for 2004. The Friday Forum is held monthly to facilitate the dissemination of information of national importance.
Last month’s presenter was Dr. Deanna Ashley, Director of Health Promotion and Protection in the Ministry of Health. She spoke on, ‘Healthy Lifestyles in Jamaica: Implications for Policy and Action’.
Persons interested in attending this month’s MIND Forum, should call the Old Hope Road campus for further details.