Government looking to bring back Boledo, revenues to be injected into various sectors

It’s been ten days since the last Boledo draw in Belize. The Government is currently looking at bringing back the traditional gambling game, and when it comes back the monies will be injected into various sectors including health. According to Minister of Health and Wellness, Kevin Bernard, he welcomes the decision as the revenues will serve the public with better healthcare.

Kevin Bernard, Minister of Health and Wellness: “One of the things that I will say to this is that I definitely support the fact that the revenues that will be generated from the Boledo part of that should go to providing quality healthcare in our country and if it is that it’s going to go through NHI as was mentioned definitely we support that at the ministry. As you know we need to roll out NHI, we need to see that that program is successful and we have to have the money so they have to have the fiscal space and this may be able to allow us to have that fiscal space to be able to sustainably support the NHI roll out so definitely from my end, my ministry’s end we support that but not just NHI we must also understand the whole health system needs to be supported. So when if we speak about health it’s not just NHI because that’s a service but it’s also our health system that needs to be improved and so we want to see that the funding that comes, whatever support will come must be invested in terms of improving the infrastructure. Improving the services, improving access to quality health care across the region especially in rural communities, especially in those areas that really need the help. We need to target and address NCD’s, we need to ensure that we are providing quality primary healthcare to ensure that we could- we are talking about a new tertiary hospital that will be built in belmopan. How are we going to ensure that that is sustainable? How are we going to ensure that it has the necessary services? How are we going to ensure that you talked earlier about the nursing gap  that we have, how we ensure that that funding that will come will allow us to be able to hire more doctors, retain our nurses. So these are things that we have to seriously look at. It’s not just about rolling out NHI but how are we going to sustain it? And how are we going to ensure that we have the necessary human resources to ensure to provide those services across the country and so it is in that aspect that I believe we need to then look at but those are discussions that we will be having I’m sure and I must say that we have a very supportive Prime Minister.”