To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Chief Sec­re­tary Orville Lon­don has ap­pealed to To­bag­o­ni­ans to be pa­tient in wait­ing for the new 100-bed Scar­bor­ough hos­pi­tal be­ing con­struct­ed at Sig­nal Hill. Con­struc­tion of the hos­pi­tal start­ed in March 2003 and it was orig­i­nal­ly due for com­ple­tion in April 2005.

How­ev­er, the project was de­layed for sev­er­al of rea­sons, in­clud­ing a dis­pute in­volv­ing the orig­i­nal con­trac­tors NH In­ter­na­tion­al (Caribbean) Ltd.Orig­i­nal­ly, the hos­pi­tal was es­ti­mat­ed to cost $136.5 mil­lion. Cost of the build­ing, in­clud­ing state-of-the-art equip­ment, is now es­ti­mat­ed at $700 mil­lion.

Chi­na Rail­way Con­struc­tion Ltd, which is now the con­trac­tor, has promised to de­liv­er the project in June, af­ter which there will be a com­mis­sion­ing pe­ri­od of at least three to six months. Speak­ing at the com­mis­sion­ing of the $28 mil­lion Scar­bor­ough Health Cen­tre at Ba­co­let Park on Tues­day, Lon­don told To­bag­o­ni­ans the first pa­tients would not be ad­mit­ted un­til a few months lat­er, af­ter test­ing of the equip­ment. He said: "I just want the peo­ple of To­ba­go to be pa­tient with the de­liv­ery of the hos­pi­tal, recog­nis­ing that as we have de­liv­ered in Rox­bor­ough, as we have de­liv­ered in Pa­tience Hill, as we are de­liv­er­ing here to­day, as we will de­liv­er in Char­lot­teville in a cou­ple of months, we will de­liv­er the Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal."

Lon­don de­scribed the cen­tre as a mag­nif­i­cent project that would re­quire mag­nif­i­cent ser­vice.

He said in terms phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture, To­ba­go is far ahead of the rest of the coun­try and the re­gion.

The cen­tre is the first of its kind in the coun­try and will de­liv­er dial­y­sis ser­vices to pa­tients. In ad­di­tion to the nor­mal ser­vices pro­vid­ed at health cen­tres, this new fa­cil­i­ty in­cludes a walk-in clin­ic where a pa­tient can get treat­ment from a doc­tor, HIV rapid test­ing and men­tal health ser­vices. Ad­di­tion­al and new spe­cial­ist clin­ics will be in­tro­duced dur­ing the sec­ond quar­ter of this year, in­clud­ing pae­di­atrics, OB/GYN, surgery and foot care. Pa­tients will al­so ob­tain such ser­vices as place­ment of per­ma­nent catheter and cre­ation of fis­tu­la-ser­vices pre­vi­ous­ly avail­able on­ly in Trinidad.