Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh said the functional completion of the central block of the Port of Spain General Hospital (PoSGH) marks the continued modernisation of the health system, as technology had been embedded in the operations of the building.
Speaking at the opening ceremony on March 10, Deyalsingh said the building to date cost an estimated $1.3 billion to date and would contain 540 beds. He described how these beds would be allocated.
“There will be 15 paediatric intensive care unit (ICU) beds dedicated to that purpose, 13 paediatric high dependence unit (HDU) beds and 66 beds in paediatric wards. Paediatrics will be returned to PoSGH. There will be ten coronary unit beds, 194 beds in surgical wards and 216 beds in medical wards.
“There will be 26 beds in psychiatric wards. Why psychiatry wards? You will have heard me talk about the decentralisation of medical health. This is part of it. So not everyone will be in St. Ann’s. We also have psychiatry wards in Arima, Sangre Grande and Pt Fortin hospitals.”
Speaking to Newsday via phone after the ceremony, Deyalsingh said the first intake of patients would happen in July 2025 and more and more services would come online in the months after that.
He said in fiscal 2026, it was proposed to completely refurbish and expand the existing accident and emergency department.
“We will be doing that through by putting in the budgetary proposals for the PSIP in 2026 for funding to do that project. The designs and user brief have already been completed, so that is the next phase of the redevelopment of the PoSGH.”
Deyalsingh said the Prime Minister had challenged his ministers to embed technology in everything they did, particularly in the health care system.
“Part of what we are doing in health is what we call an organisational renewal and modernisation strategy, targeting infrastructure. We don’t mean concrete and glass infrastructure, we mean health infrastructure, embedding that in our processes, inclusive of artificial intelligence, and moving from a paper-heavy to a paper-light to a paperless system which is purely technology.”
He said one of the biggest complaints from patients and health care workers was lost records, which the ministry was aiming to revolutionise.
“We are now in a stage where North Central Regional Health Authority (NCRHA), Eastern Regional Health Authority (ERHA) and Southwest Regional Health Authority (SWRHA) will come online on March 31, 2025, and your CT scan/MRI image, wherever you have taken it, will be able to be viewed by a clinician in any part of the country.
“To add to that, your lab work/blood results can be viewed anywhere in the country so we don’t have to re-draw blood. We have already pioneered and started to embed the use of electronic prescriptions throughout our system. The day is here when a doctor no longer has to write notes, but could recite his notes and it is automatically transcribed into text. That is already being done in St James and will be here soon.”
Deyalsingh said there had been no
