Construction is expected to commence very soon on the specialised €149 million Paediatric and Maternal Hospital, which is earmarked for Goedverwagting, East Coast Demerara (ECD).
Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony was responding to Opposition Member of Parliament, Dr Karen Cummings, when he updated the House on the project. A design has been finalised and site preparation has already commenced.
Dr Anthony said on Thursday, “We have started works on the hospital. The contractors were given six months to do the design. They have more or less completed the designs. While they were doing the designs, they have also started doing site preparations. Very shortly, we expect that they would start putting down the foundation and start building the hospital.”
Sporting a 256-bed capacity, the hospital will be financed by the United Kingdom’s export credit agency – UK Export Finance (UKEF). It will be built and equipped in two years’ time by Austria-based Vamed Engineering. The company has built over 1000 hospitals around the world.
Consultants from the Obstetrics Department and Paediatric Department of the Georgetown Public Hospital would have provided critical input on the technical design of the structure.
“We have just recently concluded the detailed design of the hospital and we had a team from the Georgetown Hospital’s Paediatric Department who provided a lot of the technical inputs into what should go into the paediatric section of the hospital.”
By early 2025, the hospital will be completed. The low-rise Paediatric and Maternal Hospital will be a referral centre for women and children. It will specialise in maternal, neonatal, and paediatric care with a huge imaging suite for services such as CT scans and MRIs, a modern laboratory, and surgical suites. The specialised hospital will be equipped with high-quality equipment sourced from the United Kingdom.
The Specialised Paediatric and Maternal Hospital was birthed from a Memorandum of Understanding between Guyana and Austria. While the agreement had catered for another set of works, the PPP/C Government had amendments for the construction of this facility after entering office.
This facility will not only be advanced but services that were never offered in Guyana before will become available. Government has said that the primary goal of expanding the healthcare services here is to make sure that Guyana reduces its morbidity rate, have less diseases and is able to treat diseases properly. It came after realising that even with massive investments and upgrades, the Georgetown Public Hospital – the country’s only referral hospital – is still limited in its capacity for certain services such as specialised paediatric care.
