Hospital expansion in Barbados with Chinese funding
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
According to an article by the media outlet Barbados Today, Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, announced plans to increase the total capacity of the largest public healthcare center in the Caribbean country, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH), by 40%, through a financing agreement from the People’s Republic of China.
The announcement was made during the inauguration ceremony of the most recent Emergency Care Center at Bayview Hospital, in which Prime Minister Mottley highlighted the strengthening of the health infrastructure thanks to the agreement between the government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with the purpose of fulfilling the commitment to expand and improve access to high-quality public healthcare.
Specifically, Prime Minister Mottley stated: “This expansion will increase the hospital’s capacity by 40 percent, being the largest expansion of the QEH since its construction.”
She also mentioned that the Minister of Health of Barbados will announce the expansion of the hospital in a ministerial statement before Parliament, highlighting the scope of this new update, which will include the construction of a dedicated oncology center.
This new oncology center, proposed within the QEH expansion, is expected to begin operations before the start of the year 2026, allowing Barbados to strengthen its capacity to provide care and procedures for cancer treatment.
It is known that this new announcement of the expansion of Queen Elizabeth Hospital comes at a decisive moment, in which the government of Barbados would be preparing its exit from the IMF program at the end of the present month of June 2025, with the purpose of freeing fiscal space to reinvest resources in critical sectors of the nation.
Prime Minister Mottley mentioned that during her administration no economic resources have been spared for the modernization of healthcare, as well as for similar investments in the education sector.
The expansion of Queen Elizabeth Hospital is part of a larger project of improvements and upgrades in healthcare, which includes the complete reconstruction of two polyclinics in Barbados and the renovation of another seven institutions of this type.
The two polyclinics that will undergo total reconstruction are Eunice Gibson, which will be located in Warrens, St. Michael, and Randall Phillips, which will be established in Oistins, Christ Church. One of the purposes of these medical institutions will be to relieve the demand on Queen Elizabeth Hospital through short-term admissions with clinical beds.
On this matter, Prime Minister Mottley mentioned that the government must ensure that, in the event of an outbreak or public health emergency, there will be around 25 additional beds in the city of Oistins, once the reconstruction is completed.
Likewise, she noted that the first installment of financing for state-of-the-art medical equipment for Queen Elizabeth Hospital has already been delivered, which involved an investment of 140 million dollars.
This amount will also be destined for the linear accelerator, which is currently inactive, while for now, the civil works in its housing facility are in the final phase before its activation. It is known that this equipment, which is crucial for cancer treatment, will begin operations before the end of the present year 2025.
Also, Prime Minister Mottley highlighted the work of Bayview Hospital, which currently has plans for the introduction of a PET-CT scanning machine, a vital diagnostic tool that is currently not available in the public health system.
Regarding these plans of the private Bayview hospital, Prime Minister Mottley commented that these fall within a public-private strategy in the health sector, highlighting that these are the processes and developments referred to when the government of Barbados talks about working jointly with the private sector.
Likewise, Prime Minister Mottley mentioned that the population of Barbados requires joint work and strategic action between various sectors, in order to reaffirm its position as a sovereign nation and not depend solely on specific facilities or machinery.
On the other hand, Prime Minister Mottley shared the plans of the government of Barbados to develop partnerships with other nations in the Caribbean region in the area of health, such as the new agreements with Martinique that will allow Barbadians to access nuclear medicine services.
Last but not least, Prime Minister Mottley emphasized that the objective of the government of Barbados is to guarantee high-quality and accessible healthcare for the entire population of the Caribbean country and highlighted the social importance of investments in the health sector, with the purpose of increasing the medical capacity of the nation.
* Original text in Spanish. Translated by Large Language Model (LLM) technology.
Main Source:
Talks underway with China on QEH expansion – Barbados Today
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