Gail Alexan­der

The South West­ern Re­gion­al Health fa­cil­i­ty (SWRHA) is look­ing at a cou­ple of step down fa­cil­i­ties for COVID-19 pa­tients to be­gin run­ning soon and oth­er re­gion­al health au­thor­i­ties are al­so get­ting such fa­cil­i­ties, says Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram.

Paras­ram con­firmed this at yes­ter­day’s dai­ly Health Min­istry up­date on the COVID-19 sit­u­a­tion.

Queries were posed on why the East­ern Re­gion­al Health (ER­HA) Au­thor­i­ty was cho­sen to es­tab­lish “step down” fa­cil­i­ties re­cent­ly. Such fa­cil­i­ties have been hous­ing con­va­lesc­ing COVID-19 pa­tients.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh yes­ter­day said fa­cil­i­ties were cho­sen by the CMO and Coun­ty Med­ical of­fi­cer to have places which had space, bed ca­pac­i­ty and no im­me­di­ate neigh­bours.

Paras­ram said the North Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NCRHA) was han­dling the bulk of COVID-19 pa­tients and the ER­HA had start­ed step down cen­tres at Ba­lan­dra and San­gre Grande.

Paras­ram added, “Oth­er RHAs are be­ing asked to get sim­i­lar fa­cil­i­ties. The SWRHA is look­ing at a cou­ple which we hope to get run­ning soon, so the ER­HA alone wasn’t cho­sen. All oth­er RHAs have that op­por­tu­ni­ty out­side of the NCRHA which has a heavy bur­den.”

Deyals­ingh al­so said he’d re­ceived yes­ter­day morn­ing, the ER­HA’s re­port on the pro­cure­ment of the San­gre Grande step down cen­tre and its readi­ness for COVID-19 pa­tients ar­rival last week­end.

The min­istry sought the re­port af­ter re­cent­ly re­port­ed is­sues at the cen­tre. Pro­cure­ment is al­so be­ing ques­tioned af­ter an Ex­press re­port in­di­cat­ed the fa­cil­i­ty was be­ing rent­ed for $105,000 month­ly for the next three months and the own­er’s al­leged to have ties with the rul­ing PNM. Deyals­ingh re­cent­ly said the arrange­ment was done be­tween the ER­HA and he sup­posed “all that” would come out in the re­port.

Yes­ter­day Deyals­ingh said he couldn’t make any promis­es on whether Gov­ern­ment would do as Ja­maica and oth­ers have done— planned re­ward for health­care work­er—but he said: “We’ll look at it.”

He al­so said once au­thor­i­ties get the ca­pac­i­ty they’d start mo­bile test­ing for the virus. But the Gov­ern­ment is await­ing ex­trac­tion kits. He said they have 4,000 kits but this didn’t come with ex­trac­tion as­pects. Deyals­ingh al­so urged el­der­ly and preg­nant women es­pe­cial­ly, to get the 40,000 (H1N1) flu vac­cines Gov­ern­ment is of­fer­ing.