Investigations are ongoing into the death of 35-year-old Tricia Winth and her unborn baby at the Linden Hospital.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Hospital, Mr. Gordon Gumps, said this will determine if all protocols were followed by personnel at the health facility.

He explained that Winth was admitted to the hospital at around 20:00hours on December 26, 2009 and the hospital’s obstetrician was called out to attend to her.

“She was a hypertensive case so we had to stabilise her…She was seen at Emergency, admitted to the Maternity Ward and attended to by both the obstetrician and the gynaecologist,” Gumps related.

The CEO added, however, that because of the nature of the case, Winth was referred to the Georgetown Public Hospital.

Gumps said, “Winth came in at around 8’o clock Saturday night and was treated by the doctors up to 10 minutes to one on Sunday morning…That was the time that she was sent to the Georgetown Hospital.”

According to the CEO, the woman died on the way to the city. When asked about the operating theatre facilities at the recently commissioned Linden Hospital, Gumps said clearance was only given Monday last for the facilities to be used.

“It is a new facility so the room and equipment had to be sterilised, more than once, before use. This was to ensure that any micro organism present was gotten rid of,” he said.

The CEO added that technical personnel from Georgetown were present at the Linden Hospital conducting ‘Swab tests’ on the floors and walls to guarantee that the organisms were not present.

“During this time, when we transfer the equipment to the new building and the tests were being done, the cases that could not be dealt with were transferred to Georgetown,” Gumps said, adding that all the cases were first stabilised.

The new state-of-the-art $1.8B Linden Hospital Complex in Region Ten (Upper Demerara/Berbice) was officially opened on December 2, 2009, and was constructed by R. Bassoo and Sons Construction Company.

The facility, located near to the old MacKenzie Hospital Complex in Watooka, has been constructed with funding from the Health Sector Programme (HSP).

The HSP is a five-year, US$25.5M (over $5B) programme co-financed by Government and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the goal of the programme is to improve the effectiveness, quality and equity in access to health service in Guyana.

At the opening, the CEO lauded the initiative as a historic occasion for the Linden Hospital, and expressed gratitude to the Government of Guyana for the decision to build the new hospital there.

“We are quite happy now with our new facilities and believe that these new changes offer a better opportunity for our services to the public to be improved,” he had said.