Dr. Peter Allen, CEO, Ministry of Health
"It's quite an outrageous situation frankly and as soon as the ministry heard about it, we immediately dispatched a team of our technical staff to immediately fix the problem. That problem was fixed but then some of the challenges that had perhaps led to that problem including some infrastructure problems with broken walls and inadequate roofing were identified. And the Ministry of Health then requested from the Ministry of Finance who were quick to support us with a $25,000 estimate for immediate improvements. Those improvements are being done as we speak and we can't avoid the issue of human resources. The ministry felt obliged to write to the management of the hospital to say 'how on earth could this have happened? You have cleaners, cooks, and supervisors for the cleaners, supervisors for the cooks, stores managers, nursing administrators, and hospital administrators. Somebody must have dropped the ball'. And so what we do is ask the managers basically to show caused why we should not take some kind of disciplinary action. Now of course the Ministry of Health can't take disciplinary action but we would pass on that information to the Ministry of Public Service and the Public Service Commission. And then see if that will rise to the level in their opinion of disciplinary action. We have in place infection control procedures, infection control guideline, and proper monitoring procedures to make sure that nothing like this can happen. But of course it did, and so we believe that somebody dropped the ball in this regard but none the less we take the opportunity to retrain and reemphasize in all of our other institutions that everyday proper steps, procedures must be followed, because the hospitals are open 24hours a day, 7 days a week."