The ante-natal clinic at the Leonora Diagnostic Centre will soon be expanded and upgraded to a full range maternal care centre.
Cabinet, at its September 6th meeting, offered its’ no objection to the use of $74.4 million to create a centre for women to access a full range of maternity services, including pre-birth and post-delivery health care.
Speaking at this week’s post-Cabinet press briefing, held at the Ministry of the Presidency on Thursday, Minister of State Joseph Harmon explained that the facility will ease the current burden of the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPHC) maternity ward.
The contract will be executed by the Builders Hardware and Quality Timber Project Company, Harmon added.
Harmon further explained that the project arose out of concerns expressed by President David Granger during a visit to the maternity ward in December, 2015.
“His major concern at that time was the condition under which pregnant women were being treated and the manner in which they were making deliveries… he called upon the Minister of Public Health and myself to go around and find a proper place where some extension in the hospital can cater to maternity cases to deal with the conditions under which women were required to give birth. The [Diagnostic Centre] is one of the areas… identified that has the space and can, with some adjustment, be able to provide that facility so that the women who are coming from Bartica and other places in regions 2, 3, 7, 8 and 9, that they don’t have to come to Georgetown; rather, there will be a facility at Leonora which can cater to their needs,” he said.
In a release following the briefing, the Ministry of the Presidency explained that the visits by President Granger to the Diamond and Leonora Diagnostic centres earlier this year were designed to give him a first-hand look at some of the challenges facing both health providers and patients.
The President was reported as saying at the time of those visits that the fact-finding mission provided the government with an idea of the capacity for the expansion of maternity facilities to other locations.
“We wanted to see the challenges that face the ordinary patients who came in off the road; mothers particularly, and we want to see what measures needed to be put in place in order to provide a better quality health care,” he had said during one of his visits.
The release added that it is with this focus in mind that the government in 2015 had allocated “$23.2B to the health sector to ensure that the delivery is much improved, with $133.1M of the sum being spent on the upgrading and equipping” of the GPHC, “in an effort to increase the capacity of the maternity unit by 50 beds. In 2016, $28B or 10.9 percent of the National Budget was allocated to the sector.”
Additionally, in April 2016, the President commissioned a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Bartica Regional Hospital, which was upgraded to become a full-fledged regional maternity facility.
