New private ward opens at K.H.M.H.
A few short years ago it seemed like a decent hospital room was hard to find. But today a host of new medical facilities are actually advertising their quality care. The latest ribbon cutting occurred this afternoon…and the location may surprise you.
Janelle Chanona, Reporting
This afternoon, Minister of Health Joe Coye and Mrs. Joan Musa officially opened a new private ward at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital.
The four room addition to the K.H.M.H. is divided into a paediatric section, an intensive care unit and four private and semi-private rooms. The rooms come complete with a television, a refrigerator and a patient call alarm system.
To stay in this part of the hospital will cost approximately two hundred and twenty-five dollars a night, a rate substantially lower than other private facilities.
During brief ceremonies at the hospital today, Coye called the venture a show of solidarity, as the plan is to use to proceeds of the new unit to subsidize other wards.
According to Faye Lofter, the nurse slated to run this ward, the cost of staying here is well spent.
Faye Lofter, Head Nurse, Private Unit
“Basically, you’ll be paying for service, quality service, quality care on a whole. We’ll take into consideration the family and everything.”
Janelle Chanona
“So you’ll be able to bend the rules a little bit more in this part of the hospital?”
Faye Lofter
“We need to be flexible, so when it comes to the private unit…one would say that they’re paying their money and they’re looking for quality service, quality care on a whole. So yes, that will happen. But as opposed to like being on the general wards…”
Janelle Chanona
“But in the wards you’re still getting quality service?”
Faye Lofter
“On the ward you get quality service, but on the wards it’s a bit different because there are times when you have one nurse to twenty-five patients, which is highly impossible for you to give quality care.”
Nurse Lofter says the plan is to have the nurses here work on a one on one basis.
Faye Lofter
“We are catering, just to begin with, with fifteen nurses. That’s only nurses in the nursing staff, and then for the other ancillary staff, we have attendants, security, and then we have the domestics.”
The new ward will be ready to accept its first patients this Sunday. Reporting for News 5, I am Janelle Chanona.
The renovations were done by Michael Holmes Construction Ltd. at a cost of approximately one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars.
