How UHWI's Effort to Reform Itself Was Defeated by an Internal Power Struggle Involving Its Chief Doctor, Carl Bruce.
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The University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) is facing mounting pressure over poor patient care, management and governance failures, and procurement irregularities.
The state-run institution was the site of a recent protest by nurses who claim that because of inadequate bed space and resources at the Accident and Emergency Department, patients were being resuscitated on the floor.
Now, minutes of UHWI board meetings show that, as these problems were festering, an effort to recruit a transformational CEO in 2023 collapsed amid internal resistance from the hospital’s chief doctor Carl Bruce and then-Acting CEO Fitzgerald Mitchell.
The minutes submitted to the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and obtained by 18° North raise questions about whether entrenched interests blocked reforms that could have addressed the deficiencies of the teaching hospital.