Asha Javeed

Lead Ed­i­tor In­ves­ti­ga­tions

asha.javeed@guardian.co.tt

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says the new Cen­tral Block of the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal will be com­plet­ed and op­er­a­tional by the first quar­ter of 2025.

He said the project, which is bro­ken in­to six dif­fer­ent pack­ages, is all fair­ly ad­vanced.

“The hard con­struc­tion should be fin­ished by Oc­to­ber 2024 and all things be­ing equal, hope­ful­ly, com­ple­tion by Feb­ru­ary, March, April 2025. So, in the first quar­ter,” he said fol­low­ing a tour of the project last Thurs­day with con­trac­tors and of­fi­cials from the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T (Ude­cott) and the Min­istry of Health.

Deyals­ingh ob­served that there were dif­fer­ent pack­ages with dif­fer­ent time­lines, but not­ed that the 540-room fa­cil­i­ty will be one be­fit­ting the sta­tus of the cap­i­tal city.

He said the new hos­pi­tal will al­so have surge ca­pac­i­ty to take care of any emer­gency which could hap­pen in the city.

In three weeks’ time, the struc­tur­al con­trac­tor, Uni­ver­sal Struc­tures Lim­it­ed, will hand over the struc­ture to Chi­na Rail­way for out­fit­ting works, he said.

Im­ti­az Adam, the chief ex­ec­u­tive of Uni­ver­sal, said that they had com­plet­ed most of the works in Tow­er 1 and should com­plete work in Tow­er 2 in three weeks.

He said Uni­ver­sal had al­ready be­gun de­mo­bil­i­sa­tion on the site.

Deyals­ingh not­ed that the out­fit­ting should be com­plet­ed by Oc­to­ber 2024.

The project is bud­get­ed at $1.3 bil­lion.

Chair­man of Ude­cott Noel Gar­cia gave the as­sur­ance that the project will be with­in bud­get and with­in the time frame.

In May 2019, the Gov­ern­ment signed an agree­ment for the con­struc­tion of the new Cen­tral Block with Shang­hai Con­struc­tion.

How­ev­er, the project ran in­to prob­lems which forced Shang­hai Con­struc­tion to de­fault on the con­tract in No­vem­ber 2021, af­ter costs in­creased be­cause of US$9 mil­lion in ex­tra freight costs (then due to glob­al pan­dem­ic-linked sup­ply-chain woes) and oth­er costs which it blamed on bu­reau­crat­ic de­lays.

By April 2021, the Gov­ern­ment ap­proved a new ap­proach for com­plet­ing the project, by di­vid­ing it in­to pack­ages.

The hos­pi­tal need­ed to be re­placed be­cause the in­fra­struc­ture had aged and was dam­aged from the 6.1 mag­ni­tude earth­quake in Au­gust 2018.

“We are pleased with the con­trac­tor. There are a num­ber of peo­ple who doubt­ed the abil­i­ty to com­plete the su­per­struc­ture,” said Gar­cia.

“There were some hic­cups but it was over­come quite suc­cess­ful­ly.

“It demon­strates the ca­pac­i­ty of the lo­cal con­struc­tion in­dus­try. There are too many naysay­ers who be­lieve that on­ly for­eign con­trac­tors can do this com­plex type of con­struc­tion,” he added.

Deyals­ingh said that the de­mo­li­tion works, which was com­plet­ed by Kall­co Con­struc­tion, were with­out in­ci­dent and the area had been con­vert­ed to a car park for about 100 ve­hi­cles.

Gar­cia not­ed that ten­ders for med­ical equip­ment are in and are now at the eval­u­a­tion stage and ten­ders for fur­ni­ture were al­so in and be­ing eval­u­at­ed. The project, he said, dove­tailed with the ur­ban re-gen­er­a­tion for the east of Port-of-Spain.

The fa­cil­i­ty will in­clude ac­ci­dent and emer­gency ser­vices, an op­er­at­ing the­atre and re­cov­ery room, in­ten­sive care unit, high high-de­pen­den­cy unit and an­cil­lary ser­vices.