Published 23rd December 2020
Basseterre
Buckie Got It, St. Kitts and Nevis News Source
Basseterre, St. Kitts, December 23, 2020 (SKNIS): During an airing of “Leadership Matters” on December 22, Minister of Health, the Honourable Akilah Byron-Nisbett, shed some light on the soon to be implemented Health Information System.
She said that the Health Information System is a database that will store all of an individual’s medical information within the Public Health System.
Minister Bryon-Nisbett stated that the system will be first rolled out across all hospitals within the Federation.
“Once you go to the hospital, anything you need to go to the hospital for, whether it is medication, if you are staying there, whatever it is that you are diagnosed with, all this information, that is your medical history, will be stored in the system,” she said.
The Health Minister noted that if a person needs to access the database, they will have to present their medical ID, which will be a card given upon signing up with the system.
“Let’s say you come to the hospital for service eight o’clock in the morning and then by eight o’clock in the evening you are not feeling well, you have to come back again, the shift has changed since then and so the doctors may not know what has occurred unless they pull your charts, you have to make sure all the information on those charts are correct, but instead of pulling your charts and asking the information over and over again, you present your medical ID, that medical ID is scanned so when you come back at eight o’clock, the doctors are aware of what transpired in the morning when you were there,” said the minister.
She added that the Health Information System will also be implemented in the communities.
“So even if you access services at one of our health centres, all of your medical information will also be stored within the Health Information System,” she said. “So if you leave from Dieppe Bay and you go to the Basseterre Health Centre, your information will be shared across the different health centres and the different health institutions.”
Minister Byron-Nisbett noted that this allows for easy referral of patient information and easy referral of patients within institutions, that is, the health centres and the hospitals.
Retraining of staff has already begun at the hospitals and will hopefully be rolled out by mid-2021.
In addition to this, Minister Byron-Nisbett said that the ministry is embarking on a project to connect all health centres across the Federation to the JNF General Hospital.
“That project should also be started next year through the help of the Universal Service Fund,” she stated. “We are grateful for having that assistance from that fund to be able to implement a network within the community that connects back to the JNF which would make our Health Information System easier to roll out.”
