GOVERNMENT is planning to construct a modern hospital at De Kinderen, Region Three to facilitate citizens living in and around the area. Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony made the disclosure during the recent commissioning of a $30 million blood bank at the West Demerara Regional Hospital.
“We have to also move with the demographics because if you have a lot of people clustering in that area then we need to provide a facility that is closer to where this concentration of people is located.
“So, one of the things that we’ll be doing is we’ll be building a new hospital at De Kinderen; the region has already identified the land and, this year, in another few months, we should start the construction of that hospital,” Minister Anthony said.
The hospital will be equipped with approximately 75 inpatient beds, two operating theatres, one minor theatre, imaging suite (digital x-rays, ultrasound, CT scans), modern accident and emergency and outpatient departments, Department of Public Information (DPI) report said.
The minister said government is also working on having “electronic health systems”; that would allow healthcare facilities to move information at a faster rate and improve efficiency.
Additionally, $104 million was allocated to upgrade health centres in the region. While speaking about that project, Dr. Anthony said, “if we can’t change the culture then we have to make sure we can facilitate people when they come early, so if we don’t have an outside waiting area then we have to build that; if we don’t have sanitation facilities while people are waiting then we should build that.”
Another US$1 million was expended to re-engineer and upgrade the Leonora Hospital; that was part of the “Smart Healthcare Facilities in the Caribbean” project that is being funded by the United Kingdom Department for International Development.
The minister assured health workers that the government will continue investing in the sector, while urging them to care for the facilities and work towards improving the quality of health services in the region, DPI noted in a release.
Meanwhile, the construction of a new hospital in the compound of the West Demerara Regional hospital is part of the government’s manifesto promise to provide improved infrastructure and improve the quality of healthcare services in all administrative regions across Guyana.
“The intention is that because a lot of this is very old… we can’t utilise it as effectively as we would like to and therefore what we want to do is to build a completely new hospital that would be modern, and it would have a lot of equipment, but the negotiations for that are still ongoing and we haven’t finalised that as yet, so once we do that you would have a new hospital being built in this compound.”
Dr. Anthony said the project was currently in the design phase; however, monies have also been expended to upgrade other sections of the hospital.