Timeline for Cornwall Regional Hospital restoration

The Mt Salem, St James-based Cornwall Regional Hospital (CRH) , which was built in 1974 and is the only Type A hospital in western Jamaica, has been undergoing a lengthy rehabilitation process for six years to date.

Below is the timeline of events which sparked that restoration work at the 10-storey, 400-bed facility:

• September 2016 – Concern arose about noxious fumes from the hospital building’s ventilation system, resulting in its accident and emergency department being vacated.

• February 2017 – Concern about noxious fumes arose again at the hospital, resulting in several departments from the building’s first three floors being evacuated. Investigations by the Ministry of Health and the Pan American Health Organization subsequently revealed that fibreglass particles from the ventilation system were the cause of the fumes.

• May 2017 – Dr Ken-Garfield Douglas, the regional director of the Western Regional Health Authority (WRHA) at the time, announced that the hospital’s fourth, fifth and sixth floors, which housed the intensive care unit and the operating theatres, were to be refurbished and cleaned in order to be reoccupied by May 30. He also announced that the overall restoration work was estimated for completion by September 2018.

• June 2017 – The hospital’s nursery was relocated from the sixth floor to the seventh floor after nurses complained of feeling ill because of the fumes from the ventilation system.

• January 2018 – Mould was removed from the hospital’s eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. Arrangements were also being made to relocate the hospital’s boiler from the basement to an external building.

• March 2018 – During the week of March 2, Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton announced that the relocation of the hospital’s boiler would take two weeks to complete. The overall restoration project was estimated for completion by November, at a cost of $2 billion.

• August 1, 2018 – The Ministry of Health appointed an oversight committee for the restoration work. The committee, headed by Professor Archibald McDonald, estimated that the hospital should be fully operational by August 2019.

• January 2019 – Tufton announced that replacement of the hospital’s inner plumbing and electrical fittings and restoration of the roof would take place in another few months, at a combined cost of $500 million.

• February 14, 2019 – McDonald, head of the oversight committee, revealed to the St James Municipal Corporation that the total restoration work would increase to between $3 billion and $3.5 billion.

• December 12, 2019 – McDonald announced during a press conference at the Grand-A-View Restaurant in Montego Bay that the restoration project should be completed by December 2020 at a cost of $3.8 billion to $4 billion. He also responded to critics who suggested just building a new hospital, by saying that the cost for such an endeavour would be $30 billion, money which Jamaica could not afford.

• May 2020 – Allocated funds for the hospital’s restoration were reduced from $4 billion to $1.7 billion, in accordance with the Government’s 2020/21 estimates of expenditure. According to the Government’s fiscal policy paper for the 2020/21 financial year at that time, the CRH was to benefit from a J$3.9-billion allocation for the improvement of several health facilities across the country, which would also benefit the Western Children and Adolescents Hospital, which is being built on the CRH’s grounds.

• September 2020 – The independent oversight committee monitoring the restoration work announced that the rehabilitation process, including work on the facility’s tower, could be delayed until as far as 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• October 2020 – The committee reiterated that the work’s completion date could be either late 2021 or early 2022 because of the pandemic’s effects.

• November 17, 2020 – The West Jamaica Conference of the Seventh-day Adventists, which had been housing several of the CRH’s facilities since 2017, voiced concerns that its mentorship and skills training programmes would suffer the longer it had to give up space on its grounds for the hospital’s antenatal clinic, physiotherapy department, and several lab operations.

• December 2020 – McDonald declared that the CRH’s renovation could be completed by the first quarter of 2022, if the Government were to speed up administrative procedures that he said had delayed the project.

• January 14, 2021 – Opposition Spokesman on Health, Dr Morais Guy, argued that the restoration could take between $10 billion and $12 billion to complete, up to four times what the committee had indicated it would cost, but Tufton scoffed at the suggestion.

• November 18, 2021 – Tufton announced at a contract-signing ceremony between the Ministry of Health and Wellness and engineering firm M&M Jamaica, held at the Sandals Montego Bay Resort in St James, that the resumption of the planned rehabilitation of the CRH should begin before the Christmas period that year.

• February 10, 2022 – The proposed budget for the 2022-2023 financial year was tabled. Out of the $912-billion estimates which were proposed at that time, $5.8 billion was announced as the new price tag for CRH’s completion.

• March 28, 2022 – Dr Jeffrey East was appointed by Tufton to chair the oversight committee, replacing McDonald following the latter’s resignation. At that time, Tufton indicated that he hoped the project would be completed in less than three years, before 2025 (by at least December 2024).

• May 4, 2022 – Guy observed that the budget presentation for the 2022-2023 financial year had stated that the CRH project would cost $5.8 billion to complete, but he reiterated that $4 billion had been spent up to that point, and that the total cost would be double the proposed budget.

• February 23, 2023 – The cost of the restoration work has now been estimated at $10.5 billion, up from the 2022 $5.8-billion price tag, with the increase to cover Phase 3 of the redevelopment project and to include rehabilitation of the 10 floors and procurement of furniture, information technology supplies, and medical equipment. Phase 3 will also entail putting back the drywall, partitions, electrical sections, plumbing, air-conditioning ducts, returning equipment, and painting. The completion date has been set at March 2025.

• ( NOTE: East stepped down as oversight committee chairman two weeks prior to this announcement, indicating that the terms of reference were not made clear to him at the time of his appointment.)