WESTERN BUREAU:The Jamaica Medical Doctors Association (JMDA) has joined residents of western Jamaica in expressing displeasure that the timeline for the completion of the St James-based Cornwall Regional Hospital’s (CRH) 10-year-long restoration has been extended to as late as March 2027.Health and Wellness Minister Dr Christopher Tufton said on June 25 that he is pushing for the Mt Salem-based CRH’s full restoration to be completed within the current financial year, which ends on March 31, 2027. He noted that the restoration of the CRH’s Accident and Emergency Department (A&E) should be completed during or after this summer, allowing for an opening by the end of September.However, in response, the JMDA’s first vice-president, Dr Jubilee Brown Service, said such a statement was deplorable in light of the nine previous timelines given for the CRH project’s completion since the 10-storey facility – the only Type A hospital in western Jamaica – began experiencing concerns about noxious fumes in September 2016 and has been operating with reduced resources ever since.“We say that this is unacceptable, because the reality is that, for 10 years, the doctors and nurses have been working very hard to maintain some semblance of a healthcare facility with limited resources and limited spaces. We are not happy about this new timeline that has been set for March 2027,” Brown Service told The Gleaner.“This is 10 years and counting that we are talking about, and you must remember that medicine is an art and a service that requires urgent delivery of care very often. Patients are still being treated on the floor of the Accident and Emergency Department at the CRH; on the ground, because of limited space, and that is unacceptable,” Brown Service added.Noxious fumesThe CRH, which was built in 1974, has been undergoing restorative work since noxious fumes from the hospital’s ventilation system resulted in the evacuation of its first three floors in February 2017, five months after the A&E Department had to be vacated because of similar concerns. The cost of the work is currently estimated at $23.5 billion, almost 12 times the initial projected cost of $2 billion.In May 2017, Dr Ken-Garfield Douglas, then regional director of the Western Regional Health Authority (WRHA), announced that the CRH’s overall restoration was estimated for completion by September 2018. That was the first projected completion date for the project, and since then nine other dates have been put forward, with March 2027 being the latest.Brown Service also rubbished suggestions that the passage of category-5 Hurricane Melissa on October 28 last year could account for the latest extension of the timeline to complete the CRH’s restoration. Before the hurricane, during a press conference on October 9, Tufton had expressed hope that the project would be completely finished by September this year.“In good conscience, I do not think Hurricane Melissa is a good excuse for what we are experiencing now, because this has been happening for years. I would not want anybody to tell my relative that came into the hospital as an emergency case, ‘Oh, let us allow for Melissa’, because it is unacceptable,” said Brown Service.In addition to the multiple projected timelines for the CRH’s restoration, the hospital has been dogged by numerous reports of patients having to sit on chairs in the A&E Department for lengthy periods while waiting to be admitted, a concern that reportedly predated the facility’s noxious fumes issue.Charlene Gayle, a resident of Canaan, St James, who had to take her mother to the CRH for medical treatment last year, told The Gleaner that the poor service she and her relatives received during that visit caused her to dismiss the hospital as a reliable facility for medical emergencies.“My mom was feeling a sharp pain in her chest and her heart racing, so I took her to the CRH, and she was there for two weeks, and she ended up getting a stroke. Even though she got the stroke, she was sitting in a recliner chair, and we had to make noise for her to get a bed for her to stretch out,” Gayle recounted.“Where she was sitting, you have mad people there, and you have persons who have gotten shot and stabbed. If they want to use the bathroom, it is the same place they go to do it, and it is there you also have to eat, and it sent up my mother’s blood pressure,” Gayle added.‘Slap in the face’Dennis, who did not want his full name used, is a Montego Bay resident who took his mother to the CRH for treatment in 2016. He said the delay in the hospital’s restoration is insulting to people who need quality care.“People need the services of a fully functioning and staffed hospital, and in my opinion, the delay in the CRH’s development is a slap in the face to the taxpayers. My mother had a stroke and it took a very long time for her to get a bed, and I stayed up with her into the early morning while she was in a wheelchair, until she got a bed,” said Dennis.In a release on July 1, Opposition Spokesperson on Health Dr Alfred Dawes called for Tufton to provide an independently verified completion plan for the CRH with binding timelines, as well as an update on the status of a medical dome that was to be put in place to provide additional bed spaces at the hospital site.“Every missed deadline comes with a new excuse. First, it was caution, then it was rescoping, then it was the contractors, the engineers, a shortage of local expertise. These excuses have expired,” Dawes said in the release.christopher.thomas@gleanerjm.com