‘A wish list’

Opposition spokesman on health Dr Alfred Dawes has described as a “wish list” an announcement by Health and Wellness Minister Dr Christopher Tufton that the Government will construct four new public hospitals which will nearly double the bed capacity of the facilities they are replacing. The facilities to be constructed are a new 250-bed Black River Hospital in St Elizabeth, a 250-bed Falmouth General Hospital in Trelawny, a 150-bed Noel Holmes Hospital in Hanover, and a 720-bed Kingston Public Hospital Campus at Orange Street, downtown Kingston. “I must tell the honourable minister, that is indeed a very well put-together wish list,” Dawes said sarcastically as he rose to respond to Tufton’s 20-minute-long statement in the House of Representatives on Tuesday in which the minister told his fellow parliamentarians of the plans to construct the new facilities. “We can rarely call it anything more than such because the weight of Cabinet approval is not a budget item,” Dawes added. Tufton told the House that Cabinet had approved a partnership between his ministry and the National Reconstruction and Resilient Authority (NaRRA) for the works to be carried out. It is being done in collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Dawes, the Member of Parliament (MP) for St Catherine South Eastern, told the Parliament that all Jamaicans want better, safer, and more resilient hospitals. “The challenge we have consistently had is that whenever this Government is tasked with delivering, we don’t know the cost, we don’t know the completion time, and we don’t know who is going to staff it. And we have seen that happen over and over again, Dawes said. He reminded the legislature that in the early 1990s under an IDB-funded project to improve hospitals, there was a special implementation unit in the Ministry of Health. “This project to rehabilitate and construct major hospitals is going to be lumped with the Montego Bay Hip Strip development, the Vernamfield development, and any other NaRRA project that they deem fit,” he said. The first-term MP pointed to the continued rising costs associated with the Cornwall Regional Hospital redevelopment project and argued that patients in western Jamaica continue to suffer. “In fact, patients all across Jamaica are suffering [and] the staff, they’re protesting almost weekly at this point. And every time there is a protest or concern on social media we’re treated to tours of hospitals to come,” he said. “This cannot be the status quo; we cannot continue to suffer while we hear about what is to come. This Government has had 10 years to deliver and now they are delivering promises to come,” Dawes argued. He said that the Opposition accepts that money must be spent on the hospitals that are being rebuilt, but said, “We would like to know how much money is going to be spent on the abandoned Black River Hospital, how much money are we sinking into these buildings that the minister has, quite honestly, said are unfit for inhabitation and occupation.” Dawes also argued that a hospital is not just a building and a bed, not [just] something to lie on. “A hospital is service. A bed without a nurse is a mattress,” he declared. He lamented that there was nothing in Tufton’s presentation about a staffing plan and pointed out that by the health ministry’s own numbers Jamaica was experiencing an attrition rate of 500 nurses each year. Dawes said the 47 nurses who arrived from Ghana recently are a welcome addition but that is a mere drop in the bucket. In his statement, Tufton repeated that the climate-resilient facilities will be reconstructed and modernised by NaRRA. He did not give a cost or timeline for construction. “Together these projects will deliver some 1,370 beds inside modern, climate-resilient hospitals. The three rural hospitals alone will raise beds from 260 today, to 650 beds, more than doubling the facility,” said the minister.