Recent concerns about the state of Jamaica’s hospital infrastructure must not be dismissed. They reflect a real and long-standing challenge. Many of the main public hospitals were built before Independence, and others, though expanded over time, are now being asked to serve populations and medical needs far beyond what their original designs contemplated.

It is also true that a major public hospital hasn’t been built from the ground up in more than two decades. The last such major development was the new May Pen Hospital structure, officially opened in 1997. That gap is precisely why the current hospital infrastructure programme is structural, necessary, and long overdue.

The ministry fully accepts that modern healthcare cannot be delivered on outdated infrastructure alone. That is why the present plan focuses both on restoring existing national assets and adding new capacities where population growth and service demand are greatest.