JAMAICA | $200 Billion Later, More Mothers Are Dying, says PNP Health Spokesman Alfred Dawes
Opposition Spokesman on Health and Wellness Dr Alfred Dawes
The public health budget has swollen from $60 billion to more than $200 billion since 2016. A World Bank review of the same years finds women dying in childbirth at rates not seen in a generation. The Opposition says the problem is not cash — it is priorities.
MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, November 4, 2026 - — Jamaica is spending more than three times as much on public health as it did a decade ago, and the women in its labour wards are dying at rates not seen in thirty years.
That is the brutal arithmetic laid out on Wednesday by Opposition Spokesman on Health and Wellness Dr Alfred Dawes, who seized on a World Bank review of the sector covering 2016 to 2022 to argue that the Holness administration has bought itself a bigger budget without buying Jamaicans a better health system.
The public health allocation stood at $60.15 billion in 2016/17, the year the Jamaica Labour Party returned to office. This year the Ministry of Health and Wellness commands more than $200 billion. Yet the review, according to Dr Dawes, found maternal mortality higher than it was three decades ago and neonatal mortality higher than when the Government took office.
“The budget has more than tripled, yet the World Bank review finds mothers and newborns still dying at rates that are too high, cancers and chronic diseases rising, and patients reaching hospital too late for cheaper treatment,” Dr Dawes said. “This is a priority problem, not a money problem.”
The numbers the Ministry already knew
The Opposition is not inventing the trend. The Ministry's own statistics, reported by the Gleaner in June 2024, show the maternal mortality ratio rising from 96.4 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2017 to 156.7 in 2022 — more than double the Sustainable Development Goal target of 70. In the Southern Regional Health Authority the ratio exploded from 26.8 to 273 over the same period.
Newborns fared little better. The Planning Institute of Jamaica's 2022 Voluntary National Review records the neonatal mortality rate climbing from 12.7 per 1,000 live births in 2016 to 15.2 in 2019 — before the pandemic ever reached these shores.
Those figures matter because they blunt the Government's stock defence. Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton, confronting the same data in 2024, acknowledged the rise but attributed it largely to COVID-19, insisting Jamaica was “as much victims” of the pandemic as the rest of the world. The World Bank's review window, however, opens in 2016, and the neonatal line was already heading the wrong way three years before the first case was diagnosed.
“Jamaicans have paid for a better health system. The World Bank review shows they have not received it.”
— Dr Alfred Dawes, Opposition Spokesman on Health and Wellness
A system that arrives too late
Beyond the maternity ward, Dr Dawes said the review paints a picture of a health system that spends heavily and intervenes late. Chronic, non-communicable diseases now account for close to 80 per cent of deaths. Too many patients turn up at hospital with advanced disease that would have been cheaper — and more survivable — to treat had it been caught at a health centre. Medicine costs have risen rapidly. Health centres, the first line of defence, need more doctors and nurses than they have.
Most damning, in the Opposition's reading, is the finding on accountability. The Ministry signs service level agreements with its four regional health authorities, documents that are supposed to spell out what the public is owed for its money. The review found they are not being used to hold anyone to account. In other words, the instruments of discipline exist on paper and nowhere else.
Four priorities, one demand
Dr Dawes called for the health budget to be reset around four priorities: fund primary care so that health centres are open, staffed and stocked; train, retain and deploy doctors, nurses and technicians; buy and maintain equipment in public hospitals; and enforce the service level agreements with quarterly published data on wait times, equipment downtime, staff vacancies and drug availability.
The last of those is the sharpest. Published quarterly data would convert a private contract between the Ministry and its regional authorities into a public scorecard — one that patients, journalists and the Opposition could read for themselves. It is precisely the kind of sunlight the system has so far declined to let in.
“Jamaicans have paid for a better health system. The World Bank review shows they have not received it,” Dr Dawes said. “Start with the mother in the labour ward and the patient on the waiting list.”
The question for the Government
Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke told Parliament in March 2024 that the World Bank-supported expenditure review would guide how the finance and health ministries worked together on the sector. The Government has not yet publicly answered the Opposition's account of what that review found.
It will need to. A tripled budget is a political achievement the administration has been content to advertise. The World Bank has now asked the harder question — what did it buy? — and the answer, on the evidence of Jamaica's own mortality tables, is that a woman giving birth in a public hospital today faces worse odds than her mother did.
No amount of money spent is a substitute for lives saved. The Ministry's defence cannot rest on the size of the cheque. It must explain the size of the graveyard.
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