Gail Alexan­der

The new Scar­bor­ough Hos­pi­tal, be­ing built at an ap­prox­i­mate cost of $500 mil­lion and now stand­ing tall against the To­ba­go sky­line, should be ful­ly com­mis­sioned by the end of the third quar­ter of next year, Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning said yes­ter­day. "It seems to be on sched­ule and on track and from what we have seen the qual­i­ty work is of a very high stan­dard. "The man­age­ment is su­perb. It's about 65 per cent com­plete at this time and we're very pleased about that," Man­ning said yes­ter­day af­ter tour­ing the fa­cil­i­ty with of­fi­cials of the ex­e­cut­ing con­struc­tion agency, Chi­na Rail­road.

Not­ing it was a project that had need­ed re­me­di­a­tion work, now be­ing done by Chi­na Rail­way, Man­ning said that was the most dif­fi­cult part of the job and that has been com­plet­ed. He added: "I'm very im­pressed with what I've seen of the fa­cil­i­ty and when the project is com­plet­ed the Health Min­is­ter has as­sured me that when it is op­er­a­tional it will be the most mod­ern in the Caribbean." When Man­ning was asked if he would go to the 103 bed-fa­cil­i­ty for fu­ture heart check-ups, he said with a laugh: "It would de­pend on the state of my heart."

Chi­na Rail­road was award­ed the con­tract to com­plete the project af­ter is­sues arose with NHIC which had re­ceived the ini­tial award to build the hos­pi­tal. In Par­lia­ment on Wednes­day To­ba­go West MP Stand­ford Cal­len­der said costs rose from the ini­tial $135 mil­lion in the NHIC con­tract to over $400 mil­lion in two years of NHIC's work.

For­mer min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley turned the sod for the hos­pi­tal project in 2003.