Negative reports may prompt new hospital funding from Europe

In another follow up, this time to a story we ran last night, on Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital, News Five has been unable to obtain a new consultant’s report on the facility, written in April of this year. Sources in the Ministry of Health tell us that the criticisms in the 1998 document are even more damaging than the June 1997 study which was cited in our story. That report cited poor design, construction and maintenance at the three-year-old hospital and concluded that the nation of Belize did not get value for money. One positive result of the studies, which were commissioned by the European Union, is that they will form the basis of a request to the E.U. for additional funding to correct the building’s worst flaws and implement new procedures which will hopefully make the hospital function at an acceptable level.