Sav hospital expansion to begin next year
Published:Sunday | December 3, 2017 | 12:00 AMPaul Clarke
The chronic shortage of space at the Savanna-la-Mar Public Hospital will soon be a thing of the past as plans are in the pipeline for a new block to be constructed, the hospital's chairman, Eric "Busha" Clarke, has said.
The new block will take the bed count past 300 and ease the pressure on the Type B facility which, despite a 40 per cent increase of the population size in the town, has not been expanded since it opened to the public in 1964.
"The number-one issue at the Savanna-la-Mar hospital has been space. We really don't have space to do anything at all," Clarke told a press conference at offices of Jamaica National on Belmont Road, Kingston, last week.
"I am happy to say that the minister has instructed the National Health Fund to start design on a new building. I am sure that we will see what that looks like by sometime next week, and then we can start talking about costing," he said.
Construction could top $300 million based on design, but Clarke said that at a minimum, it would be a two-storey building capable of hosting the clinic, a pharmacy, the records office, and other non-essential departments that would have been relocated from the current building. The expansion will take in at approximately 25,000 square feet of space.
TAKE OUT NON-ESSENTIALS
"It's not going to be a small building because the plan is to take out what I call the none-essentials - such as the pharmacy, the clinic, the records office - out of the current building and put them in a new space that will free up a lot more room to expand the wards," Clarke said.
"We are very fortunate in that we have a lot of ground space and in tandem with that development, I am pleased to announce that the much-talked-about sewage system will be commissioned next month,"
he said.
Construction on the new building should begin next year, with a defined budget in place. The hospital said that a public-private partnership agreement is to be sought to provide funding, along with government input.
"The wards at the Savanna-la-Mar Hospital are overcrowded, and we simply do not have enough physical space to draw on. So the need for a new building is extremely urgent at this time," Clarke told The Gleaner.
Chief Medical Officer at the hospital, Dr Alfred Dawes, said that the acquisition of a mobile C-Arm Fluoroscopic X-ray system sets a new standard for quality care at the health facility.
The machine was procured at a cost of US$125,000 (J$16 million) with assistance from charitable organisations such as Young at Heart and Food For The Poor.
"As a result of the donation of this critical piece of equipment, we have come a far way in securing vital (health) information of our patients and at the same time improving our services to our community. We have never had one before at the Savanna-la-Mar Hospital" Dawes said.
Other improvements include an expansion of the laboratory for inpatients and outpatients, renovation of the doctors' and nurses' lounge, as well as the repairing and resurfacing of roads on the hospital compound.