By Kimone Witter
The Regional Director for the South East Regional Health Authority (SERHA), Errol Greene, says he is not in support of charging a fee to use bathrooms at public health facilities.
The issue was raised following a report in the Sunday Gleaner, which highlighted unsanitary conditions of bathroom facilities at seven hospitals and four health centres.
Mr. Greene argues that hospitals already spend a "tidy sum" on maintaining bathrooms and management has a duty to monitor these facilities to ensure things like a broken pipe are repaired.
"The toilets that are broken, we can't do much about that because as fast as you put them on, they break them off and they steal them. But I'm not in agreement to charge people a fee to use toilet facilities in public hospitals," he insisted.
He was responding to a recommendation from Dr. Winston Dawes, former Senior Medical Officer at May Pen Hospital in Clarendon, who said during his tenure, he implemented a payment system for use of the bathrooms at the public hospital.
He said there was marked improvement in the state of bathrooms at the facility.
But the programme ended prematurely following a complaint by a patient.
"She came in and said she don't see why she should pay to use a toilet and made a complaint, and they came down and said that you cannot charge to use toilet, so the whole system collapsed and the whole thing went back into disrepair," he revealed.
Dr. Dawes and Mr. Greene were speaking Monday on Radio Jamaica's Beyond the Headlines.
