With the aim of enhancing healthcare services across the country, the Guyana Government has signed a contract for the construction of a spanking new modern and state-of-art hospital at New Amsterdam in Region Six (East Berbice-Corentyne).
This was confirmed over the weekend by Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony.
The US$161 million contract was signed in July 2023 between the Ministry of Health and VAMED Engineering – the Austrian-based company that is currently constructing the €149 million Paediatric and Maternal Hospital at Goedverwagting, East Coast Demerara.
Health Minister, Dr Frank Anthony
The construction on the new facility at New Amsterdam is expected to commence soon.
The Health Minister, who was at the time speaking at the opening of the two-day Neonatal Conference on Saturday, disclosed that the new Region Six hospital will have the same high-level status as the Paediatric and Maternal Hospital. The new modern New Amsterdam facility will have approximately 220 beds with five operation theatres along with a cardiac suite.
It was previously reported that the new facility will be furnished with cutting-edge technology, enabling the provision of critical medical procedures, including open heart, kidney transplant, and pancreatic surgeries, which are currently unavailable at the New Amsterdam Regional Hospital.
Additionally, the new hospital at New Amsterdam will also feature a two-storey building that will be set aside for training doctors and nurses as well as allied health workers.
New Psychiatric Hospital
Meanwhile, Dr Anthony further explained that when the new institution comes into operation, the old facility will be repurposed, with a portion to be dedicated to a new Psychiatric Hospital.
According to the Health Ministry, the current National Psychiatric Hospital building in Fort Canje, Berbice, is outdated, having been built since the 1860s.
With the new Psychiatric Hospital, however, Government will be aiming to deliver a different type of psychology services.
“The new way of treating psychiatric patients is when they have an acute episode, you treat and when that episode is over, they can go home. So, the new facility will have 120 beds for acute patients but we don’t want people to stay too long in the institutions,” Minister Anthony pointed out.
He went on to note that when that new hospital is open and the old facility is closed, Government would have to find sort of a halfway home for those long-term patients currently there.
In August 2022, Government implemented a series of new laws that now sees the country being governed by a modern and progressive Mental Health Legislation.
A major element of that new law is deinstitutionalisation, that is, having mental health patients reintegrated into society after treatment as opposed to putting them in the National Psychiatric Hospital and locking them away.
There are approximately 200 persons at the Psychiatric Hospital – many of whom should not even be there.
Last November, Dr Anthony had pointed out that while the modern thrust now is to deinstitutionalise patients, this is proving to be difficult since families are not willing to accept these patients who have recovered through treatment.
“The challenge that we’re having is that the relatives of these patients sometimes do not want to accept them back home and so that has been one of the main reasons why many of these patients who can really go home, are not able to go home. So that is something that we’ll have to find some solution and deal with it,” he had said.
However, the Health Minister noted at the time that the new legislation is centred more on patients’ rights to be treated much better than what the previous legislation would have contemplated.
As it is, the exact number of mental health-related cases in Guyana is unknown since a lot of people with these illnesses – depression, anxiety, psychosis – go undiagnosed. So, only a fraction of these cases are being recorded.
To this end, Dr Anthony pointed out that Government has been placing a strong emphasis on mental health issues.
On this note, a Suicide Prevention Bill was passed in the National Assembly last November, paving the way for the decriminalisation of suicides, among other initiatives. Another intervention undertaken by this Administration was reviewing the National Suicide Prevention Plan 2015-2020, which was done by two consultants from the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), who determined how much of that plan was implemented, and from that, Government was able to ascertain what needs to be done in the new plan. (G8)
