PM admits CRH rebuild would have been cheaper

Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness has admitted that it would have been more cost-effective to demolish and rebuild the Montego Bay-based Cornwall Regional Hospital (CRH) when it started having infrastructural problems, instead of rehabilitating it over the past decade.

“Building a hospital is not the same as building a hotel,” Holness said at the reopening of the Accident and Emergency Department on Friday, noting that a few hotels have been built in the time taken to restore the hospital .

“ … It is even more complicated when you are trying to rehabilitate a building that was not built for the purposes for which you are trying to achieve its final rehabilitation. In retrospect, it may have been a quicker operation to have torn down the building and just build a new one,” he said.