Finally, Bipartisan Agreement on a New General Hospital

Four years ago the Owen Arthur administration decided that a new general hospital should be built to replace the decrepit and outmoded Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

Four years later, the present government has now decided to reverse its initial objection to that decision and have now agreed that we do indeed need a new general hospital. After 44 tortuous months in office they have come to recognize that the present hospital is an increasing drain on the public purse while it does not meet the needs of the general public in the 21^st century. Following decades of patchwork quilt maintenance, changing medical technology, improved structural standards and design and increasing congestion The QEH has proved to be unsustainable

Unfortunately, because of petty political posturing, there has been a great escalation in the project cost and much time has been lost in the planning process as well as with the work that has to be done to train a new generation of technical staff. A new hospital would also require innovative operating systems and structures of management that would maximize the efficiency of the staff at all levels.

Along with the initial planning of the building design and construction, there should be a parallel planning of the maintenance of the facility. Suitably qualified engineering staff should be employed in the earliest stages in order to familiarize themselves with the new hospital, establishing proper preventative maintenance procedures and implement them from the very beginning.

Relocation of the hospital to a higher elevation and to a more accessible site would be of long term benefit and improve the capability of the institution to respond in times of natural disasters or mass casualty events. Given the improvement in road systems and the ubiquitous availability of vehicular transportation there is now greater flexibility in choosing a convenient location for ease and speed of public access to the vast majority of the public.

The practice of medicine today is a team effort of physicians, nursing staff, record keepers, sanitation workers, information technology and communication specialists, catering facilities for patients and staff, pathology, and pharmaceutical dispensing services but to mention a few. This in depth support is critical for effective, safe and error free patient care.

A new hospital will mean developing a new way of recruiting, retaining and managing the knowledge intensive workers that will be essential to get the true benefits from the enormous capital cost of a new facility. While we focus on the design and structure of a new building and its location as well as how we plan to finance this massive project, we also need to take care of some of the essential things at the very basic level that will support the success of this venture.

For example, we need to promote the study of the physical, chemical and biological sciences in secondary schools and to create an excitement in the scientific curricula. The importance of a sound grounding in science cannot be understated for many of the essential professions in today’s economy. It goes without saying that a science background is a prerequisite for the nursing profession, yet a staggering number of youngsters who chose to apply for nursing school have to attend remedial classes in science and many who may have a natural aptitude in caring for the sick and elderly find that a lack of a sound grounding in science prevents them from maximizing their potential in the nursing profession.

The new hospital is a very necessary project and given its cost and complexity needs the very best technical planning and implementation. Equally challenging will be to get the human equation right and with our present organizational structures and planning priorities that is an impossibility.

  

phillip.goddard@braggadax.com

Compulsory Acquisition of Private Property

The Constitution of Barbados guarantees the right of private property ownership, it further protects us from the deprivation of our property except in situations where there is an urgent public need and in such instances of compulsory acquisition the owner must be fairly compensated with a monetary settlement. Examples that readily come to mind for compulsory purchasing of land are for road improvements and road construction, the erection of public buildings and construction of schools or low income housing projects. Once acquired, if the property is no longer needed for the original public purpose it should be first offered to be returned to the original owner.

The concept of Eminent Domain or compulsory acquisition of private property is a long established right of sovereign governments to acquire private property without the owner’s consent where there is well recognized public need. Exercising the right of compulsory acquisition should not be taken lightly and should be for clear and transparent reasons for the public good.

Since biblical times, compulsory acquisition of private property has been exercised by monarchs and potentates, become part of English Common Law, codified in the Napoleonic Code and is part of the 5^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

From the earliest times the exercise of compulsory acquisition has been fraught with problems as individuals and assemblies defined public use with increasing elasticity or used its provisions for private gain. King Ahab of Samaria’s acquisition of Naboth’s vineyard next to his palace was an early example of how not to do things as Elija subsequently pointed out. In more recent years, American municipalities and states have moved the goal posts from public use to public benefit until the Supreme Court ruling in Kelo v. The City of New London created such a public outcry, that legislators in most of the 50 states swiftly moved to strengthen private property laws and rein in the excesses of compulsory acquisition.

Closer to home we cannot forget the government’s acquisition of Graeme Hall Plantation to establish the Ministry of Agriculture and the subsequent divestment of much of the land to private developers who profited mightily from the subsequent sub-division. In more recent years Parson’s Pest Control Limited successfully challenged the government’s acquisition of a portion of its property and the Barbados Supreme Court case number 154 of 1999 on the Town Planning web site makes for interesting reading.

Finally we come to the news last Friday of a most remarkable plan by the government to compulsorily acquire a section of land from Secure Shred Inc. at Vaucluse in St. Thomas, with the intention of transferring that land to a competing private company engaged in the same business activities as the company that presently owns the land.

By what stretch of imagination could this be possibly deemed to be in the public interest? How on earth can this maneuver be described as environmental protection? What must corporate Barbados think about its property rights and the business environment that this precedent would create?

This proposed action by the Ministry of Housing and Lands is a monumental abuse of the powers of compulsory acquisition. It should be abandoned before the public purse is further impoverished through the inevitable litigation that will follow as well as the incalculable damage to the investment climate that would result from such an action.

There is now a clear need to improve the criteria, transparency and mechanisms of compulsory acquisition as well as the management of the inventory of property purchased in this manner.

phillip.goddard@braggadax.com

Need for Thorough Analysis Before Action

There is much that we can learn from the world of aviation and the continuous search for improved safety standards in design and operational procedures. In just over a century we have progressed from aircraft made of wood and fabric powered by relatively unreliable reciprocating engines, to the marvels of today’s world of airliners constructed with composite materials powered by powerful turbine engines of great reliability. Year by year the safety record of air travel has steadily improved to the point where it is safer to fly than drive or to walk across the crosswalks on the ABC highway.

Along the way, we have learnt the difficult lessons of flying great distances in all types of weather at ever increasing speeds and altitudes while improving the reliability and safety of aviation. As ever, when pushing the frontier of knowledge, there has been a cost in dreadful accidents with great loss of life as well as simple mishaps with relatively minor repercussions. The one common thread has been thorough investigations into the cause of aviation accidents to determine the many factors that caused the mishap with a view of taking sound corrective action to prevent or reduce the possibility of a reoccurrence of similar accidents.

Through thorough detective work and painstaking investigative procedures we have come to better understand both the design of airframes and power plants as well as the effects of fatigue and stress on aircrews and improved systems of navigation. The object of aviation accident investigations is not so much to affix blame and take punitive action as it is to arrive at an understanding of the factors that caused the accident so that appropriate corrective actions can be taken.

There is seldom a single factor that results in the crash of an aircraft. Weather, pilot training, management of air crews, adherence to operational procedures, cockpit design, maintenance of the airframe and engines are but some of the factors that must be considered. In a fatal crash many disparate issues that by themselves were not critical may coincide to lead to a disastrous outcome. To produce effective and meaningful corrective action it is critical for us to understand as many of the contributing factors as we can that are involved in a catastrophic incident.

There is much to be said for taking this rigorous and thorough investigative approach to other areas of human activity such as the collapse of buildings, household or industrial fires and industrial or construction accidents. To go a step further the society would benefit from a similar approach in the investigation of the causes of financial collapse of major projects or vital corporate entities that affect us all.

After a long period of denial and obfuscation we seem to be finally getting somewhere with unraveling the collapse of Clico. While the emphasis seems to be on recovering funds for the stranded clients there should be an equally strong case made for improving our systems and governance to minimize the possibility of a repeat of this most unfortunate financial collapse.

Similarly, to my mind, it has never been satisfactorily explained why the Four Seasons Project ran into financial difficulties. It is not enough to say that the global recession was the sole cause. The business plan and its execution might well have been seriously flawed and if so throwing more money at it is not a solution. To tinker with the basic structure in the hope that a solution might be found, is like patching the De Havilland Comet without determining the design flaw that created metal fatigue at the corners of its square windows causing the aircraft to disintegrate at high altitudes.

Certainly this risky approach to investment is not an appropriate use of our National Insurance funds as there is no certainty that Four Seasons two point zero will not spiral out of control in another flat spin.

phillip.goddard@braggadax.com

An Interesting Month for Science

This past Month has seen the award of a Nobel Chemistry Prize, the discovery of neutrinos that possibly exceed the speed of light, and the death of the greatest innovator of our time, Steve Jobs. It all speaks to the remarkable advances in pure scientific discovery and causes us to reflect upon the transformative power of innovative genius. Once again we are reminded that the given wisdom of one age can well become the mythology of the next.

Daniel Shechtman, an Israeli, won the Nobel Prize for chemistry for his discovery of quadricrystals, a unique mosaic of atoms that form a regular mosaic of patters that never repeat themselves, a structure that broke all the accepted rules of how crystals ought to behave. His discovery was initially rejected by the scientific community in the most uncomplimentary way, but later vindication led chemists to fundamentally alter the way in which they conceive solid matter and brought about a paradigm shift in solid state physics.

Potential applications include protective alloys and coatings. As a result of Dr. Shechtman’s discovery, work is being pursued to improve diesel engine performance, improve the strength of high quality steel and enhance light emitting diodes. 

In another sphere of research, scientists conducting the OPERA experiments at CERN detected particles called neutrinos that traveled 730 kilometers from Geneva in Switzerland to Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy 90 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Until now it has been thought that the speed of light through a vacuum was an absolute speed limit. The speed limit of light is the backbone of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and a constant in Quantum field theory, the mathematical theory on which all results in particle physics are based. If substantiated, this discovery would radically alter our view of the universe and may explain the possibility for time travel. The verification or disproval of such a radical discovery has now become one of the most urgent of scientific quests.

A few short days ago, Steve Jobs died from complications of pancreatic cancer. His genius and vision brought about a global transformation of ubiquitous computing; changed the way we listened to music, watched videos and communicated with text and graphics. He completely altered the world that we live in by changing the way that we gained access to information and shared that information with others. He developed the personal computer and then in an act of what seemed to be corporate cannibalism he leapt over his own boundaries and proceeded to replace it with the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

His innovations have led to an explosion of information and sharing of ideas across physical and ideological boundaries. This in turn, has created a global upheaval that expresses a thirst for individual freedoms and a common desire for improved standards of human rights. It has also changed the way that we conduct business and moved us with increasing velocity toward the establishment of a global market place. The tools that Jobs created for us have revolutionized the way that we live, work and play and the world has changed forever.

Scientific discovery and innovation depend on us challenging or verifying the given wisdom of our times and not accepting things as they are or as they seem. The progress of man depends on a continual search for fundamental truths and innovative thinking.

phillip.goddard@braggadax.com

Solar Energy’s Hidden Costs

One of the adages that we have all grown up with is “start wrong, end wrong”. It is as true for a building as it is with life and certainly with the development of public policies. It is obvious to most of us that if the foundation of a structure is not sound the building itself will be structurally unsound and, over time, become dangerous to those that live or work in it. This will either cause the building to be condemned and demolished or may result in a catastrophic collapse resulting in loss of life and human suffering.

There are many external factors that may impact upon a poorly designed or constructed building. Right away our minds leap to the more obvious ones such as hurricanes or earthquakes but there are many other factors such as slow erosion of subsoil or unforeseen adjacent construction that causes a disequilibrium and ultimately failure in the supporting structure.

In recent years there have been some dramatic examples of buildings collapsing because they started wrong. Public policies are no different but not as obvious. When they collapse there is no dramatic crashing of masonry and steel and no cloud of dust with ambulance sirens wailing in the distance. Instead there is a drain on the public purse and a decline in our quality of life. All too often we start wrong to achieve what is seen as a laudable objective and this is where expediency and mendicancy plays an insidious role.

We have a problem, a solution is offered with funding and strings attached, we need the foreign exchange inflow that would arise from the external funding and we swallow the bait. The hook is set and then comes the ongoing cost of maintaining the project and there is no certainty that we have solved the initial problem.

That scenario is played out over and over again and one old example that comes to mind is the solar powered air conditioning system installed many years ago at the Ministry of Agriculture. Today it is the taxpayer funded installation of solar electrical generating systems.

Our problem is the escalating cost of energy and the outflow of foreign exchange to meet the cost of generating that energy. The foreign exchange component is a combination of the capital cost of the generating and distribution equipment and the oil that is presently imported as fuel for conversion into electrical energy or to be used in the combustion engines of cars, trucks, busses, farm equipment and fishing boats. Global oil production has a finite lifetime and has become increasingly expensive to recover from deep wells and depleted reservoirs. It is also subject to geopolitical price shocks. Solar energy on the other hand is free. But there comes the rub. How do we leap from an increasingly scarce resource and escalating prices to free energy?

If government has to subsidize the installation of solar generating systems it must be evident that the economics of transitioning from oil based generation to solar generation does not look appealing to the market place. The idea seems good but the technology has not yet been developed to create the efficiencies that would make economic sense. There still is no free lunch.

In steps the external funding agency that would provide soft loans or grants or any combination thereof. It would be an immediate infusion of foreign exchange.  This then becomes the driver of a policy decision that would put the factories to work in China, the U.S., or Europe by providing a market for solar panels, inverters and batteries at our expense while transferring the burden of future investment in the generation of energy to the businesses and householders of Barbados. A short term gain in foreign exchange is soon replaced by a long term hard currency drain as the capital cost of energy generation escalates and becomes increasingly fragmented, difficult to manage and unreliable.

In addition to this, the electric company will still be required to have the installed capacity to provide electric power to meet the demands of the island thus the national capital cost of generating electricity will be increased as more and more redundant systems are installed.

A switch from Oil to natural gas seems to be the better solution in the near to medium term.

phillip.goddard@braggadax.com