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Policy shifts needed to take advantage of health-care opportunities – Tufton at launch of national population and sustainable development policy on 2025 World Population Day

Kingston July 15, 2025

The Minister of Health highlighted that two policy and culture shifts are needed at this time to ensure that adequate health-care staffing for the Jamaica population is in place. He identified these as access to an internationally diverse pool of health-care workers to operate hospitals, and also certification of community-based health-care workers to promote preventative health care.

He called on disruption to the delivery of courses for medical and allied professions to include the medical and nursing councils to allow persons to train for specific roles.

Speaking at the World Population Day event hosted by the Planning Institute of Jamaica and the UNFPA on July 11 in Kingston, Minister Tufton said that Jamaica loses on average 500 specialist nurses to migration. He noted the recent inclusion of Nigerian health educators and health specialists from India and the Philippines to Jamaica as being important to maintain hospital services.

He said, “The vision is that in the future not only will we see clinical rotation out of those countries to fill the void that we have but we will see, more importantly, a sustainable approach to training so that we can train more of our own, whether they stay here or go abroad. That, to my mind, is an important pivot in the policy that has to be embraced as part of how we rightsize the workforce; certainly in health care,” Minister Tufton said.

Noting that the population of Jamaica should be trending to between 3 and 3.5 million persons, Minister Tufton said that the “sick profile” of Jamaicans will need more specialists than the country can produce, despite the decline in population, “We are still in and around 2.7 million persons  and when compared to 2019…based on the forecasting, if this trend continues into a decline there are some who say in the next 20 to 30 years Jamaica could be hovering closer to 2 million, other things being equal.”

On the other end of the spectrum, the Minister said that community health workers will become important to the health sector.

“They are not registered nurses but they have the qualifications to take the pressure off the system of curing and this should be the norm. We will have to find a way for persons to do specific jobs as opposed to the traditional approach where you are not a health care worker unless you are a registered nurse,” Minister Tufton said, noting that nine years ago Jamaica had 1,000 community health aids who gave basic health advice, did vitals, combed hair, washed dishes, and turned persons lying in bed with a stroke. “They were the front-line workers during COVID, extremely important, vital to my mind,” Minister Tufton said.

The National Population Policy for Sustainable Development 2022 is available on the PIOJ website. The Jamaica Population Health status Report 2000-2022 was tabled during Minister Tufton’s 2025 sectoral presentation in Gordon House.

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