Labour Day Project To Help Children’s Hospital Reduce Surgeries Backlog

Twenty children, aged four to 12, will benefit from free surgical procedures at the Bustamante Hospital for Children on Labour Day.

The day, which is celebrated each year on May 23, encourages national volunteerism and collective acts of service that reflect the industrious and caring nature of the Jamaican people.

This year’s Labour Day theme is “Re-igniting a Nation for Greatness – Protect our Heritage and Environment”, and Consultant in Anesthesiology and Critical Care at the medical facility Dr. Brian James, is confident that this project will be impactful. He said the facility’s Labour Day initiative is in response to the growing number of backlog surgeries at the hospital.

“We estimate that we have a backlog of about 3,000 patients that need operations that did not happen because of the pandemic. As a result, we have become very strident in our efforts to eliminate this. So, we’ve developed all kinds of plans in order to achieve this. And this Labour Day project is one of them,” Dr. James said, before highlighting that the children were chosen from the largest age cohort of patients.

He informed that on average 3,100 operations are conducted per year at the Bustamante Hospital for Children. This, however, was reduced to 1,800 in 2020, the first year of the Coronavirus pandemic in Jamaica. And in 2021, the numbers were lowered even more to 1,500 surgeries.

“Since Labour Day is a single day, we want to benefit as many patients as possible. What we did was to try to choose [operations] that would be fairly simple to do and would not take a very long time,” he said.

For that reason, the health practitioners will focus on orthopedic and general surgical operations for the day, prioritising the repair of different hernias and removal of metal works implanted during previous surgeries.

After Labour Day, the number of patients seen each day will increase to further reduce the surgical buildup.

“The most important thing that we would like to achieve is a restoration of all [four] of our operating theatres to full function. If we’re able to do that, then within about 24 months, we should be able to operate on all 3,000 patients. We want to get back to a situation where we can do more than 3,100 patients per year. And what we need to do, is eliminate the backlog that we have, and this project is a small step in that direction,” he said.

Dr. James said the hospital remains committed to offering high level quality service to the zero to 12 age group.