Health Ministry Employees Recognised for Outstanding Performances During Fiscal Year 2022/23

Just over 100 staff members of the Ministry of Health and Wellness have been recognised for performing outstandingly under the Ministry’s Performance Management and Appraisal System (PMAS) for fiscal year 2022/23.

During a recent function at the AC Hotel by Marriott Kingston to celebrate the members’ achievements, Portfolio Minister, Dr. the Hon. Christopher Tufton, said the occasion marked a cultural shift in the Ministry, noting that the honorees were setting a standard for others to follow.

He pointed out that the Ministry’s staff are often the first point of contact when it comes to health emergencies, adding that the public’s expectations of them are high.

“When people have an emergency, even if it is a headache, we must solve it and we must solve it fast,” Dr. Tufton emphasised.

He highlighted the fact that, annually, the public health system attends to approximately three million patients visiting either a clinic or hospital.

The Minister further pointed out that most of those patients get the remedy they seek within the system.

Against this background he said that awarding the staff was a good way of motivating them and commended those who were recognised.

Dr. Tufton added that the awardees represent leaders among the over 23,000 health care workers across the island.

For his part, Permanent Secretary, Dunstan Bryan, said the top performers “reflect the first fruits of the Ministry’s efforts to achieve and sustain a performance culture in support of enhanced service delivery and satisfaction levels among both our internal and external stakeholders.”

He noted that they were the team members earning the distinction of being the first to have met or surpassed their targets under the new Performance Management System, being implemented across the civil service.

“This performance culture promotes employee engagement, facilitates feedback from stakeholders and prioritises monitoring, evaluation, and learning,” the Permanent Secretary said, while adding that the value proposition is simple. “As a Ministry, our job is to provide policy and programme direction to the field to enable the delivery of quality health services to the population. We must ensure that we do that job well, and then are rewarded when we succeed,” he added.

Mr. Bryan encouraged all staff members to endorse the new performance culture being built within the Ministry, while emphasising that the stakes are high in public health.

Notable areas, he highlighted, are the sick profile of the population, the growing problem of non-communicable diseases, exposure to emerging diseases, and Jamaica’s vulnerabilities to climate change risks.

“It means that the work that we do as a Ministry of Health and Wellness is important, and that it matters,” Mr. Bryan underscored.