Minister of Health Dr Frank Anthony on Saturday commissioned a new 15-bed Infectious Disease Unit in the compound of the New Amsterdam Regional Hospital, in Region Six.
The $41 million facility is to be used to house patients in the region after years of health authorities being forced to transfer such persons to the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPH).
Speaking at the commissioning, Anthony said the unit represents the country’s progress in managing COVID-19.
He recalled that at the start of the pandemic there wasn’t any hospital capacity, which forced the GPH to create a makeshift section for COVID-19 patients.
According to him, at that time there were less than seven ventilators available to COVID-19 patients and in some cases those who needed ventilatory support were unable to get it.
However, he said now there have been great improvements, including in the area of hospitalisation, where there has been an increase from seven beds to 375 beds across the country allocated to COVID-19 patients, not counting 15 beds at the new unit.
He also mentioned the distribution of ventilators along with oxygen concentrators to almost all the regional hospitals.
Regional Chairman David Armogan, who also spoke at the commissioning ceremony, said that at the beginning of the pandemic, the region had to hurriedly find a location to house COVID-19 patients within the region. However, he said, while they were using some buildings in the Rose Hall Estate compound temporarily, there were several issues as the location, which was left unmanaged after the closure of the estate. “Many times patients would call me to say that the toilets not flushing, the sink not running, the bathroom was not functioning,” he related, while noting that they were nonetheless still grateful to GuySuCo for allowing them to use the facility.
Armogan also thanked the regional COVID–19 team for working in “difficult conditions” and credited it for having “saved many lives of persons who were suffering from COVID–19…”
He continued: “They have done a tremendous job. Now we have better facilities. We expect better performance.”
Armogan stated that with the investment from the government, it is important that the public be assured that the level of performance will be improved within the health sector.
Meanwhile, Chief Executive Officer of the New Amsterdam Regional Hospital Dr Bob Ramnauth recalled that the site of the unit was a “swamp” when he first visited about five months ago along with the Armogan, Regional Executive Officer, Narindra Persaud, and Regional Vice Chairman, Zamal Hussain. “My socks and everything was mud,” he noted.
But he said that they identified the need for an Infectious Diseases Unit at the hospital, which was built some seventeen years ago. “Once the need was recognised the resources were then gathered and pooled and the will to get it done was here,” he said of the facility, the design for which came from regional engineer Morvin Budhan.
He pointed out that they also looked at how costly it was for relatives of patients to visit their loved ones hospitalised in Georgetown, especially if they did not have other relatives to offer accommodations in the city.
Dr Ramnauth then called on the staff who will be attached to the unit to pay keen attention to the maintenance of the facility. “Preventative maintenance is a good concept but it is a very expensive one. If we can’t embrace preventative maintenance at this time across the health sector, let us at least embrace running maintenance as it goes down let’s get it out. Let us have downtime to be a minimum,” he stressed.
