Shari Smikle

🚨After nearly a decade, Cornwall Regional’s Accident & Emergency is back in the main building. Yesterday’s reopening restored full emergency services to the only Type A hospital serving western Jamaica for the first time since 2017. The new unit is twice the size of the old one, with two operating theatres, a trauma bay, isolation rooms, CT scanner, digital X-ray, two minor procedure rooms and a 10-bed observation ward. Moving A&E back into the main building also frees space for another 35 beds. For families across St James, Hanover, Trelawny and Westmoreland, the region that drives much of the country’s tourism and economy, this is the return of proper emergency capacity after years of displacement. While the hospital operated out of temporary spaces and reduced beds (down to 296 after Hurricane Melissa), staff converted four bedrooms into two functioning theatres and a recovery room. That improvisation alone saved the country an estimated $3.6 billion in emergency surgical costs and still delivered 75% of the previous surgical volume. PM Holness has proposed renaming the wider campus the Dr Herbert Eldemire Health Services Campus, recognising the former health minister who secured the land in 1961. Mayor Richard Vernon has asked residents and staff to treat the new facility with the care it deserves. The full rehabilitation is not finished, but yesterday put modern emergency care back where western Jamaica needs it.

Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness has admitted that it would have been more cost-effective to demolish and rebuild the Montego Bay-based Cornwall Regional Hospital when it started having infrastructural problems. Read more: jamaica-gleaner.com/article/… #GLNRToday