Bermuda has won “a major victory” in getting hospital failures under independent review, a former hospital official turned whistleblower said.
However, Edward Schultz added: “As a community, we should not accept any emergency department boarding. We can eliminate it through the appropriate processes and avoid preventable deaths and increases in morbidity from boarding.
“We just have to stand up and demand that it’s done.”
Dr Schultz, who started in King Edward VII Memorial Hospital in 1988, was Chief of Emergency Services and Hyperbaric Medicine until he stepped down in 2018.
In April, he went public with calls for a non-partisan inquiry into “critical overcrowding” at the emergency department and hospital wards.
The Bermuda Hospitals Board announced last Thursday that it had taken on the British consultancy Acumentice to examine its operations and give a report with its recommendations, likely to come after about six weeks, which the board said would be made public.
Dr Schultz told The Royal Gazette he was encouraged to see that the firm had worked closely with the National Health Service in the UK because standards of accountability were generally higher there compared with Bermuda.
“I suspect this will be a good organisation to review the hospital. I’m glad to see that KEMH didn’t select one of its overseas partners, where I think there would have been a temptation there to sugar-coat a report.”
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