COVID-19 is enough evidence that Guyana needs a specialty hospital

Dear Editor,
Across the world, most countries are now reverting to converting their specialty hospitals into COVID-19 hospitals now that they are faced with this global pandemic and are using the critical care beds and equipment required to treat the worse coronavirus cases.

This action has been saving lives and repurposing equipment and appropriate people to help treat coronavirus patients. These specialty hospitals are all equipped with enough of the most critical equipment in this fight, which is the ventilator. These hospitals are also equipped with numerous anaesthesia machines and can double the intensive care ventilators. Protective equipment such as masks and the risk to the health care providers who are our greatest weapon in this fight against coronavirus; these willing staff are already used to this kind of environment.

After hearing all these things it left me to think if only we had a major specialty hospital here in Guyana all our COVID-19 cases would be under control because we would have a delicate specialty hospital for COVID-19. It is disappointing that Guyana had the opportunity to have its own 18 million specialty hospital built. This project, which was being funded by the India Export-Import (EXIM) bank was dropped in 2016 after the contracted company, Fedders Lloyd Corporation Limited, which was handpicked by the APNU/AFC Administration was blacklisted by World Bank over fraud and corruption practices.

The APNU/AFC Administration was proud to say that the project was dead. The revival of the specialty hospital would have been one of Guyana’s biggest achievements, but the dumping of that project has become Guyana’s biggest disappointment. It is the people that suffer when Government makes mistakes like this.

The specialty hospital project started under the People’s Progressive Party/Civic Administration back in 2012. It was the APNU/AFC caretaker Administration that abandoned that project. The thinking of the APNU/AFC Administration was that a specialty hospital was not needed in Guyana and to spend the monies in other areas that have to do with primary health care. It clearly shows that the APNU/AFC Administration was visionless from the beginning.

While in the Opposition, the APNU/AFC was never in support of the specialty hospital, by voting against its funding in the National Assembly. The resuscitation of controversial specialty hospital project is one of the People’s Progressive Party/Civic’s strategies to boost this nation out of the tremendous suffering our health sector has experience under the David Granger-led APNU/AFC Administration. Medication and drugs have been in short supply at hospitals across the region during this COVID-19 pandemic.

Guyana needs a specialty hospital, in light of what we have all experienced over the past weeks. The PPP/C regime had a progressive vision hoping that a specialty hospital would be a catalyst in creating health tourism here in Guyana by taking care of local and overseas patients. All the overseas-based Guyanese leaving on the charter flight back to the USA should give us a clear indication of the level of confidence they have in Guyana’s health care system.

This coronavirus must open our eyes about our failing health care sector. It is clear that our health care leaders were unprepared for a pandemic of this magnitude. The shortage of nurses, shortage of trained doctors, sloppy management, lack of drugs – overall our public health system is in need of continuous improvement and the construction of a specialty hospital must be done and completed by 2022 to handle any future pandemic. Rehabilitating Ocean View for our COVID-19 hospital will not cut it. This is not the kind of vision Guyanese need.

Sincerely,
David Adams