Hospital Challenges Lead to Protest on St. Croix, St. Thomas

The territory’s challenged health care system prompted a small but passionate group of protesters to gather outside the Juan F. Luis Hospital on St. Croix and the Roy Lester Schneider Medical Center on St. Thomas Tuesday to demand action.

The main event occurred on St. Croix, where Karen Dickenson, representing the grassroots organization People’s Choice, led a score of people in lambasting hospital leadership and elected officials for underfunding the territory’s hospitals to the point where basic and critical equipment are in short supply.

“When you live in a society where health care is not important, your society is doomed,” she cried into a microphone. “Health is wealth. And when you have a healthy society, you have a healthy hospital, because it goes together. Money has no object in this here, because if you don’t have health, you can’t spend money. If you don’t have health, you can’t educate. If you don’t have health, you can’t love.”

Dickenson, who also runs the Collective Collaboration shelter for unhoused people, ticked off a number of deficiencies at the hospital.

“We don’t have a portable X-ray machine. We’re taking feeding tubes and washing them out and putting them back in our children,” she claimed. “We don’t have doctors. We don’t have the necessary sanitary equipment for doctors to wash their hands, to take care of our people. We don’t have a neurologist. And the list goes on of ‘don’ts.’”