South­ern­ers can look for­ward to the to­tal re­fur­bish­ment of the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal by 2025 and a new on­col­o­gy cen­tre in the com­ing months. The good news came from Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh yes­ter­day dur­ing his vis­it to San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal.

Ad­mit­ting that the three lega­cy hos­pi­tals in the coun­try, the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex and the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal have fall­en in­to a state of dis­re­pair over the decades, the Min­is­ter promised that with­in the next two years, the hos­pi­tals would be re­fur­bished.

Speak­ing with re­porters, Deyals­ingh said he has re­quest­ed from Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Pen­ne­lope Beck­les-Robin­son $34 mil­lion from the Pub­lic Sec­tor In­vest­ment Pro­gramme for this fis­cal year to un­der­take the up­grades, and he would be re­quest­ing fur­ther funds in the next fis­cal year.

He said they are em­bark­ing on a much-need­ed to­tal ren­o­va­tion and restora­tion of the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, start­ing with re­plac­ing roof tiles and mod­ernising the wards, to make it a world-class fa­cil­i­ty in two years.

“By the time 2025 rolls around, San Fer­nan­do, I’ll be proud to say San Fer­nan­do is go­ing to be to­tal­ly re­fur­bished, mod­ernised and it would re­sult in a bet­ter de­liv­ery of health care ser­vices. Staff would be more mo­ti­vat­ed to work. Pa­tients would be in bet­ter en­vi­ron­ment,” he said.

South West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (SWRHA) act­ing chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Stephen Allen ex­plained that they were start­ing with the re­fur­bish­ment of the labour, ante-na­tal and post-na­tal wards, and de­fec­tive beds would al­so be re­placed. Promis­ing a more ef­fi­cient ser­vice, he said the en­tire hos­pi­tal would be air-con­di­tioned, new tech­nol­o­gy would be in­tro­duced and the Ac­ci­dent and Emer­gency De­part­ment would be ex­pand­ed and re­fur­bished.

Deyals­ingh al­so re­vealed plans for the Au­gus­tus Long Hos­pi­tal which he said would be con­vert­ed in­to a world-class on­col­o­gy cen­tre by June/Ju­ly next year. He said he was dis­ap­point­ed when he vis­it­ed the cur­rent on­col­o­gy fa­cil­i­ty in the south.

“The fa­cil­i­ty was not re­al­ly fit for pur­pose. It was crowd­ed. The wait­ing area for pa­tients and their fam­i­lies was not up to the stan­dard I would have liked to see,” he said.

He said the Au­gus­tus Long Hos­pi­tal would al­so have a pal­lia­tive care unit sim­i­lar to what ex­ists at Cau­ra Hos­pi­tal, and the bed ca­pac­i­ty would in­crease.

Hos­pi­tals not ho­tels

The Health Min­is­ter al­so urged peo­ple with non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases (NCDs) not to “slack off”, but to con­tin­ue tak­ing their med­ica­tion and not to over-eat or over-drink. He ex­plained that in ear­ly Jan­u­ary there is usu­al­ly an uptick in peo­ple at the A&Es with un­con­trolled di­a­betes and un­con­trolled hy­per­ten­sion which puts a bur­den on the health care sys­tem.

With the Car­ni­val sea­son al­ready in swing, the Min­is­ter ap­pealed to the mas play­ing pub­lic not to treat the pub­lic health care sys­tem as a ho­tel for Car­ni­val.

“Do not bring your par­ents and grand­par­ents for us house them for Car­ni­val while you play­ing mas ... And then you want to com­plain it don’t have beds. One of the rea­son is that too many el­der­ly, and I will use the word dumped, I want to be very firm on this, are brought in­to this free pub­lic health sys­tem which we love to bash be­cause peo­ple want to go and play mas and mirac­u­lous­ly by Ash Wednes­day the chil­dren turn up, ‘I want to take back up my grand­moth­er’,” he said.

Mean­while, Deyals­ingh al­so praised the work of the med­ical staff at SWRHA. He said the au­thor­i­ty ac­counts for 32 per cent of live births an­nu­al­ly. He added that 3254 ba­bies were born at the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal to date and there have been no ma­ter­nal deaths. While the pub­lic health sec­tor ac­counts for 92 per cent of births in the coun­try, he said the pri­vate sec­tor sends dif­fi­cult cas­es to the pub­lic hos­pi­tals with 30 per cent be­ing Cae­sar­i­an births.