Health

More than 25 Montego Bay church leaders toured the Cornwall Regional Hospital rebuild and welcomed plans for a burn unit, new MRI and CT machines and more intensive-care beds, offering counselling support for hospital staff.

The Barbados Diocesan Trustees plan to turn more than two and a half acres of Anglican land at Henry’s Lane, St Michael, into a medical facility with housing for patients needing specialised care, and to open investment opportunities to Anglicans.

Antigua and Barbuda’s government bought a former Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall at Sea View Farm for US$3 million and, with advice from PAHO, will convert it into a behavioural health institute for short-term psychiatric care.

A transitional hostel for 19 young men living with or affected by HIV is complete at Mustard Seed Communities’ Matthew 25:40 Boys’ Home in Kingston, after the Kiwanis Club of North St Andrew raised more than $25 million.

An Adventist hospital team took relief to Black River after Hurricane Melissa, where the hospital had about 15 per cent of its space left, a pastor said over 90 per cent of his members had lost their roofs, and a Baptist church sheltered the homeless.

Andrews Memorial Hospital, run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church on Hope Road, marked 80 years by adding MRI and cardiac catheterisation services and pursuing Joint Commission International accreditation over four to five years.

First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens, turned its parking lot into Tree of Life, a $74 million, 174-unit affordable housing development with a health centre, after members pledged $1 million and a lawyer worked pro bono for 18 years.

The Salvation Army closed its King Street thrift store in Bermuda after 41 years, saying the shop had become hard to sustain, and redirected the space to expand its Harbour Light addiction programme from 10 to 14 beds.

Bermuda’s Anglican Church has partnered with Habitat for Humanity and the hospitals board to turn the derelict former St James Rectory in Somerset into Bridge House, a residential treatment home for up to eight psychiatric patients.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church, through AdventHealth, Andrews Memorial Hospital and its GSI Foundation, gave 40 hospital beds worth about $17.4 million to the Spanish Town and May Pen hospitals, where officials described patients waiting in wheelchairs for beds.

Preaching at the Bustamante Hospital for Children’s 60th anniversary, Rev Devon Dick said poorer Jamaicans deserve the same health care as the well-off, contrasting bank bailouts and corporate waivers with resistance to spending on the poor.

Mustard Seed Communities, which houses more than 450 vulnerable children and adults, appealed for donations in 2021 after the pandemic halted a volunteer programme that brought about 1,000 overseas visitors a year.

Bushy Park United Church in Ramble, St Thomas, turned its building into a homework centre for up to 50 students during the pandemic, supported in 2021 by a $100,000 donation and a year of internet from VM Group.

As the pandemic stretched on in 2021, Jamaican faith leaders said short-term measures had to become long-term plans, with Assemblies of God Bishop Conrad Pitkin reporting rising operating costs and falling contributions as his congregation moved online.

From June 24, 2021, Jamaican churches moved from a 50-person cap to a capacity-based limit of 70 per cent, calculated at one person per 40 square feet of worship space, the same formula applied to cinemas.