The minister should eschew short term fixes

As the Minister of Public Health Dr. George Norton completes his fact-finding walkabout, sooner or later he will have to put to us some holistic organisational solutions to the problems in the health sector as he envisages them. Therefore, before concluding, as promised last week; with some extrapolations, let me make a trite point that is usually neglected in the firmament of political competition.

As with the other social services, health outcomes are very much related to the level of economic resources available to the sector. But as the figures below indicate, there is also deep interconnectedness with other factors, e.g. culture, general poverty, geography and the