Hospitals

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.

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.

Hanoi’s Thai Ha Parish opposes a US$10 million hospital building on 61,455 square metres the Redemptorists bought in 1928 and the state borrowed in 1959 and 1973 and never gave back.

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.

Since 2017, a Seventh-day Adventist auditorium in Mount Salem has housed laboratory, antenatal and physiotherapy services moved out of Cornwall Regional Hospital. The minister praised the church, which said its own programmes had been squeezed.

When fumes forced Cornwall Regional Hospital to move services in 2017, the Seventh-day Adventist West Jamaica Conference next door hosted dialysis, lab and clinic services, delaying its own skills centre by six months.

Jonesboro’s historic Blessed Sacrament Church agreed to sell its downtown property to St Bernards Medical Center, funding the parish’s move to a new church beside its school on Highland Drive.