Ke­jan Haynes

Lead Ed­i­tor – News­gath­er­ing

ke­jan.haynes@guardian.co.tt

The Min­istry of Works and In­fra­struc­ture has of­fi­cial­ly hand­ed over the new Cen­tral Block at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal cam­pus to the Min­istry of Health.

In a Face­book post yes­ter­day, the min­istry said Works and In­fra­struc­ture Min­is­ter Jear­lean John pre­sent­ed the keys and the op­er­a­tions and main­te­nance man­u­als for the fa­cil­i­ty to the Min­istry of Health.

The min­istry said the han­dover marked the com­ple­tion of the project and brought the fa­cil­i­ty one step clos­er to serv­ing pa­tients.

It added that the Cen­tral Block was con­struct­ed by the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UDe­COTT) as part of ef­forts to strength­en the coun­try’s pub­lic health­care in­fra­struc­ture and im­prove health­care ser­vices.

Since tak­ing of­fice in April 2025, the UNC gov­ern­ment has re­peat­ed­ly chal­lenged the for­mer PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion’s claim that the Cen­tral Block was ready, ar­gu­ing that the March 2025 “prac­ti­cal com­ple­tion” cer­e­mo­ny was pre­ma­ture be­cause ma­jor con­struc­tion and out­fit­ting work re­mained out­stand­ing.

The Gov­ern­ment sub­se­quent­ly re­vised the fa­cil­i­ty’s open­ing time­line, say­ing ad­di­tion­al work was re­quired be­fore it could safe­ly re­ceive pa­tients.